Meanwhile, he continued to work hard, producing a substantial body of new work that included three novels and travel volumes on England, France, and Italy based on his copious notes. By the end of his stay in Europe he had achieved the financial security for his family that he had long sought.

In 1834, back in America and shocked by what he saw as changes for the worse in his country, Cooper published the pamphlet A Letter to His Countrymen, in which he announced his retirement as a novelist, criticized excessive American deference to foreign opinions and tastes, and defended the policies of President Andrew Jackson against his Whig opponents. Cooper was subjected to a torrent of abuse from the Whig press as a result. This was not a happy period for the embattled Cooper. He sank into what we would now call a depression but continued to work at a furious pace, turning out a travel book, The Monikins (1835), and five subsequent travel volumes. None of these proved to be a success, however. After 1836 he became virtually a recluse, seeing only his family and a very few close friends, and spending his time at his old ancestral home in Cooperstown. The repurchase of his family mansion used up a large part of the savings he had painstakingly accumulated and, along with the recession of 1837 , which caused real estate values to plummet, helped to bring about a new cycle of financial strain for Cooper. It was during this period that he began the many lawsuits that were to occupy his attention for the next decade.

Cooper’s declaration that he would abandon novel writing proved to be incorrect, however, for he could no more give up writing novels than Natty Bumppo could abandon scouting. But the novels he produced in 1838, Homeward Bound and Home as Found, were neither commercial nor critical successes. The lawsuits, the financial pressures from the recession, which deepened into a depression, and his various unwise business speculations did not seem to interfere with Cooper’s ability to work during this period, however. Rather, he appeared to gather new zest. It was in this period, battling his neighbors and engaged in lawsuits against the Whig publishers, that he decided to bring back Natty Bumppo (who had been laid to rest as an octogenarian in The Prairie) . Cooper went on to produce two of his best novels, The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841), the final two of the Leatherstocking series.

It has always been hard for critics to find unity in Cooper’s diverse body of work, and this is true even for the five Leatherstocking novels. While most Cooper critics have considered these to be his best works, they have not found a coherence or sense of wholeness, or a unity of style or outlook, in the five novels.9 The Pioneers is a fictionalized version of the historical founding of Cooperstown and events of the mid-1790s and is probably Cooper’s most “radical” work, in the sense of depicting the environmental costs of settling the wilderness. Natty Bumppo appears there as a seventy-year-old man and plays a relatively minor role. His belief that there should be no private property rights to wilderness land puts Natty at odds with society.

The Last of the Mohicans resembles the early “captivity narratives” of Mary Rowlandson and John Harris in form. Natty is in his prime in this novel, and the much more violent action of this story, which takes place in 1757 , contrasts with the other Leatherstocking tales. In The Prairie, Cooper both jumps forward in time to 1812 and transports the setting some 500 miles west of the Mississippi to portray the then uninhabited prairie. Natty is now an octogenarian as Cooper invents the idea of the West in the novel. This is no edenic scene where Indians ; British, French, and Dutch landowners; farmers; and white hunters contend for rights to the land and strive to live together. In the featureless prairie, nature seems to have already been vanquished and to have no further claims against the march of progress. The Indians have been weakened and pushed aside, and seem to have only enough energy left to attack and further decimate each other. Civilization marches into a vacuum and leaves behind a wreckage.

The first three Leatherstocking novels, however, resemble each other in that they deal in archetypes and large themes of history and legend, and do not focus centrally on the spiritual growth or consciousness of the individual character. In these Natty Bumppo plays a secondary rather than the leading role. In The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, while the myths of America’s origins hover over the story like the mists on Lake Glimmerglass, the individual characters are more “real” in that they become the center of attention. In particular, Natty Bumppo’s mental processes and emotional growth are placed in the foreground, and the large historical forces recede into the background. That is, the characters have become more real by virtue of being more truly fictional. Cooper, feeling himself liberated from the desire to instruct and from the self-imposed duty to proclaim and define the national identity, lets his imagination roam more freely. In doing so, he exhibits his full gifts as a storyteller.