Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown's 1971 history of Indian massacres in nineteenth-century America. Brown's book forced America to reassess the cowboys-and-Indians myths of the Old West and its historical treatment of native people.

The Prairie is Cooper's 1827 novel about an old Natty Bumppo in the newly independent United States. Iowa is called "The Hawkeye State" in honor of Cooper's hero.

Persuasion is Jane Austen's 1818 novel about a young woman's search for happiness. This is the novel that Cooper is alleged to have been reading when he announced that he could write a better book,Waverley, Sir Walter Scott's 1814 novel about the Jacobite Rebellion, was a publishing phenomenon, and sold in massive numbers both in Britain and the United States. In it, Scott established the historical novel as a popular literary genre.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel, The Scarlet Letter...