James Fenimore Cooper: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

Famed for his adventure novels of the American frontier and the sea, and also the author of social and political commentary, James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) received widely fluctuating contemporaneous and posthumous reviews, but is generally regarded as a pioneer in the development of the American social and political novel. In this annotated bibliography of 1943 sources, the vast body of criticism has been channeled into chapters by broad subject category and subdivided, as appropriate, by the Cooper work in question and in terms of criticism in his lifetime and after. This organization, together with an introductory survey of his critical reception and full indexing, allows the reader to trace the topics and themes that have occupied a who’s who of critics from 1820 to the present.