Deerslayer Helped Define Us All

James Fenimore Cooper is one of those 19th century writers you find in complete and undisturbed sets in the locked bookcases of old inns. Boys read him, American-studies majors are forced to read him, and a movie of The Last of the Mohicans has been dredged up from the sunken Atlantis of his reputation. But his adult audience is long gone.

It's easy to see why. His humor is torture, and his style is as fussy and clumsy as an awkward hostess. But beneath the musty packaging is a moral universe we still inhabit. Though the Mohicans have vanished with the first- growth forests, Cooper's coordinates are still familiar to us.

Cooper, the son of a rich landowner, was expelled from college, spent some years in the Navy, then discovered, in his early 30s, that he could write. Though he never lived in the wilderness, the Leatherstocking tales -- The Last of the Mohicans and four companion volumes -- cover 60 years of frontier life, from the French and Indian Wars to the settling of the Great Plains.

One of the virtues of the books, surprisingly, is a keen sense of how men and women lived in early American society, or on its margins. The Pioneers describes the growing pains of a frontier town in upstate New York in the 1790s, in which religious sects jockey for advantage and the law turns bully. The Prairie depicts a pioneer clan named Bush, whose family values include squatting and kidnapping. The new nation may have been led by paragons like George Washington and Thomas Jefferson; Cooper's characters were the nation they led. It is our first group self-portrait, and not an altogether flattering one. The man whose knack for heroics made realistic fiction in America all but impossible also showed how it could be done.

Readers went to Cooper not for his sociology but for his hero, Natty Bumppo, better known by his nicknames: Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Leatherstocking. Here was a new myth for a new world, a character whose prowess would suit him for Homer or the Round Table, scouting the shores of the Hudson River. His particular fascination is that however many unnecessary words Cooper may stuff in his mouth, Natty is laconic in action. He never fails to act when he must, and never acts when he doesn't need to. He is a man without anxiety -- "what Adam might have been . . . before the fall," as Cooper puts it. In five fat books Natty swerves from his nature once, by falling in love, but a younger and lesser man gets the girl. Down those mean forest paths Natty must walk alone, except for his Indian comrade, Chingachgook.