It is inconceivable that he will ever again enjoy a vogue; his aesthetic assumptions, his prose style, the conventions of character and narrative to which he subscribed, are too irretrievably outdated. Cooper in fact is one of the few great nineteenth-century American authors—one thinks by comparison of Poe, Melville, Thoreau, or Whitman—who never seems "modern." Time has favored those writers; while this century has discovered their genius, it has neglected Cooper's. Yet the modern adult reader, after some adjustment of his expectations, could still read eight or ten of Cooper's tales with real pleasure. And the student of literature has many reasons to read him. As America's first popularly successful novelist, his contribution to the literary and cultural life of this country was enormous. His single greatest achievement, as he himself recognized, was in creating the character of Natty Bumppo, the central figure of the five Leather- Stocking Tales. Backwoodsman, hunter, warrior, Natty has stepped from the pages of the Tales to assume a permanent place in our national imagination, and though he was a childless bachelor, he has many descendants among the other heroes of American fiction, film, and even television. The Leather-Stocking Tales have served for many as a first introduction to the mythological realm of the pathless American wilderness, what Hemingway essentially meant by his "great, good place": a realm of terror, where silent Indians lurked in the depths of the gloomy forest; of delight, where a stately buck stooped to drink at the margin of an enchanted, unspoiled lake; and above all of freedom, where a man, as the saying has it, could be a man, could indeed be a hero.
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