This, the fourth of Cooper’s celebrated Leatherstocking Tales, continues the adventures of Natty Bumppo, noble woodsman, champion of the Indians, and hero of the American frontier. In The Pathfinder Cooper undertook the hazardous experiment of resurrecting one of his most popular characters, for he had killed off Bumppo in his previous incarnation, the Trapper, in The Prairie (1827). But in 1839, at his English publisher’s instigation, Cooper began work on a romance, setting the story of his hero’s unsuccessful courtship on the mist-shrouded shores of Lake Ontario during the French and Indian Wars.

Acclaimed throughout the world when first published - Balzac praised Cooper’s ‘magic prose’, and the great Russian critic V. G. Belinski proclaimed the book ‘entirely without equal’ - The Pathfinder remains a classic account of the American wilderness.