Mixed Fiction

THE LEATHERSTOCKING SAGA, by James Fenimore Cooper, edited by Allan Nevins (833 pp.; Pantheon; $8.50). In a heroic effort to save one of his favorite authors from the oblivion of an unread classic. Columbia University's versatile Historian Allan Nevins has undertaken to streamline Fenimore Cooper for moderns. A lifelong Cooper fan who played make-believe Deerslayer as an Illinois farmboy, Nevins has taken the five Leatherstocking tales—The Deerslayer, The Last of the Mohicans, The Pathfinder, The Pioneers and The Prairie—shorn away the interminable love passages and faded humor, deftly stitched the rest together to fit into one handsome volume. Modern readers may smile at some of Cooper's dialogue, written in the days before Mark Twain cleared the air ("Manifest no distrust," says their escort to two beautiful girls wandering through Indian-infested forests, "or you may invite the danger you appear to apprehend"). Cooper still stands out as master of action—Indian wars, deer hunts, sleigh rides, combat with wild beasts, the spring run of bass—action in which the great American wilderness is always a majestic participant. There is the bold Delaware brave Chingachgook, father of Uncas. Above all, there is Natty Bumppo. Shooting out a turkey's eye at 100 yards and escaping from the Iroquois beside Glimmerglass, showing a pioneer's contempt for newcomers who "strip the airth of its lawful covering," and at last retreating to die proudly on the unvexed prairie, he stalks again as one of the epic heroes of American writing.