The Pioneers
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
CHAPTER I
CHAPTER II
CHAPTER III
CHAPTER IV
CHAPTER V
CHAPTER VI
CHAPTER VII
CHAPTER VIII
CHAPTER IX
CHAPTER X
CHAPTER XI
CHAPTER XII
CHAPTER XIII
CHAPTER XIV
CHAPTER XV
CHAPTER XVI
CHAPTER XVII
CHAPTER XVIII
CHAPTER XIX
CHAPTER XX
CHAPTER XXI
CHAPTER XXII
CHAPTER XXIII
CHAPTER XXIV
CHAPTER XXV
CHAPTER XXVI
CHAPTER XXVII
CHAPTER XXVIII
CHAPTER XXIX
CHAPTER XXX
CHAPTER XXXI
CHAPTER XXXII
CHAPTER XXXIII
CHAPTER XXXIV
CHAPTER XXXV
CHAPTER XXXVI
CHAPTER XXXVII
CHAPTER XXXVIII
CHAPTER XXXIX
CHAPTER XL
CHAPTER XLI
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) attended Yale College but was expelled. Sailing before the mast, he saw Europe for the first time on a merchant vessel. In 1808, he became a midshipman in the U.S. Navy but resigned in 1811 and married. From 1826 to 1833, he traveled extensively in Europe. With his story The Pilot (1823), Cooper set the style for a new genre of sea fiction. The Leatherstocking Tales were published from 1823 to 1841. Arranged according to the chronology of their hero, Natty Bumppo, who appears in all five romances under various names, the sequence is The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers, and The Prairie. A caustic critic of his young country, he wrote The American Democrat (1838) as a critique of his society at the time.
Max Cavitch is the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman and of a variety of articles on American literature and art. He is a professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where he also serves on the Advisory Council of the McNeil Center for Early American Studies.
eISBN : 978-1-101-14380-3
SIGNET CLASSICS
Published by New American Library, a division of
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Mairangi Bay, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Published by Signet Classics, an imprint of New American Library, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First Signet Classics Printing, March 1964
First Signet Classics Printing (Cavitch Introduction), March 2007
Introduction copyright © Max Cavitch, 2007 All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.
http://us.penguingroup.com
INTRODUCTION
James Fenimore Cooper claimed that he wrote his first novel on a dare, his second to please a fickle reading public, and his third, The Pioneers, exclusively to please himself. In writing The Pioneers, Cooper drew extensively on memories of his childhood in upstate New York, where his father William had bought a large parcel of land—land that had previously been seized from Indian tribes—and, in 1786, founded a settlement there, which he named after himself. Cooperstown was a frontier town, part of the vast network of settlements that was everywhere pushing inland from older coastal and riverine settlements up and down the Atlantic Seaboard. Land speculation and development made William Cooper rich, and he later became a county judge. The character of Judge Marmaduke Temple in The Pioneers is based on him. Other characters in the novel, including the French refugee Monsieur Le Quoi and the town doctor Elnathan Todd resemble people Cooper’s family actually knew. Though none of the characters or events in The Pioneers is strictly factual, they are all suffused with the author’s childhood memories. This element of auto-biographical reminiscence is what made the novel such a deep pleasure for Cooper to write.
But The Pioneers did more than just please its author; it helped make him an international success. It was an instant hit, selling thousands of copies on the first day of publication alone. The Pioneers has been pleasing readers ever since, both on its own and as the first in a series of five novels—the so-called Leatherstocking Tales—concerning the life and adventures of Natty Bumppo, nicknamed Leatherstocking because of the deerskin leggings he wears. Cooper didn’t write the novels according to the chronological sequence of Natty Bumppo’s life. In The Pioneers (1823), Leatherstocking is a gray-haired man, still robust but well advanced in years. The next novel Cooper wrote featuring Bumppo, The Last of the Mohicans (1826), takes place almost forty years earlier. Then Cooper wrote The Prairie (1827), in which the very aged Leatherstocking comes to the end of his life. But in The Pathfinder (1840) Natty is a young man again. And in The Deerslayer (1841) he is younger still.
Leatherstocking makes a relatively modest first appearance in The Pioneers, but his character is clearly established there along the lines Cooper would follow in the four ensuing novels.
1 comment