James Fennimore Cooper

At the Library

Walk with the indigenous people who settle North America — and with their descendants, whose more than 500 tribes range from the Arctic Circle across the Great Plains and to the Eastern Seaboard. Lakota, Cherokee, Navajo, Haida: these groups and many others are profiled in engaging entries and magnificent images and maps that authentically evoke each tribe's history and character. Learn about the spiritual and cultural traditions of Native Americans across the continent. Investigate how and when each tribe came into contact with Europeans and how their lives changed. During World War II, Marshall Stone was a cocksure U.S. pilot stationed in England. When his B-17 crash lands in a Belgium, he flees into the woods to escape the Germans. Marshall is saved only by the kindness of ordinary citizens, who, as part of the Resistance, helped downed Allied airmen back to safety. Decades later, an older Marshall Stone returns to his crash site and searches for the people who saved him, especially the courageous woman who guided him through Paris. She was a mere teenager at the time.

The Real Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne: A Novel about ...

The Scarlet Letter is one of the most important texts in the canon of United States literature. As such, it is a mainstay of secondary school English curricula, where it is usually packaged as a book about “Sin, experience, and the human condition; the nature of evil; identity and society.” (Spark Notes)

It is also, according to many teachers, the perfect text with which to teach the effective use of symbolism, and this is often the way it is taught. That’s nice. While those themes are certainly present, and the novel is indeed full of symbolism, the real story is far more patriotic and political.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the United States was still young and so was United States literature. Up until the 1820s, the literature taught in most U.S. schools was French and British literature. While some give James Fenimore Cooper credit for being “the first United States author,” in reality, Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales —although important—are really nothing more than Sir Walter Scott’s Waverly novels with an American setting and based on American colonial history. It is Hawthorne, and more specifically, The Scarlet Letter that strives to do something truly new—truly American.

What makes The Scarlet Letter different from earlier United States novels is that it is a very interior story -- a psychological tale. In short, Hawthorne strives to not only write an original novel, but he also attempts to create a new genre -- a distinctly American genre. It is therefore safe to say that this novel is about patriotism, and Hawthorne’s intent, at least in part, was to create the first truly original United States novel.

In addition to being about literary patriotism, The Scarlet Letter is about politics. Sure, there is more than enough fodder in the novel for a limitless number of secondary school essays on the nature of evil, sin and the human experience, but, in truth, the novel is far more political than all that.

The last of the Mohicans

The last of the Mohicans;, a narrative of 1757

The pioneers, or, The sources of the Susquehanna; a descriptive tale

James Fenimore Cooper, the early years

The Pioneers