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The Pioneers
The Pioneers
Nov 24, 2025 1:16 PM

Author:James Fenimore Cooper,Donald Ringe

The Pioneers

Originally published in 1823, The Pioneers is the first of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, and the one that incorporates most fully his own experience of growing up in a town of the American frontier. The heart of the novel is a conflict over who owns America, and by what concept of right. The competing claims of Native Americans, Tory loyalists, roving hunters, and visionary cultivators are pitted against one another in the area of history, and the magical village ofCooper's youth becomes the scene in which a nation's destiny is forged. The novel also marks the invention of his enduring contribution to world literature: Natty Bumpo, the Leatherstocking.

Reviews

History and legend combine in an epic recreation of the Troy myth

—— Conn Iggulden

David Gemmell carries us away to a four-cornered, wholly convincing cosmos, so masterfully done that the reader thinks, 'Ah this is what it was really like'

—— Steven Pressfield

Gripping and fast-paced, intelligent and intensely readable... should appeal to anyone who enjoys an action-packed historical epic

—— Joanne Harris

The loyalties and betrayals, the love and the hate, the endless, everlasting courage of the men - and the women - of both sides are brought to life in this vivid, inspirational recreation of the Troy myth

—— Manda Scott

'Gruesomely entertaining ... intellectually fascinating'

—— Daily Mail

'A tragi-comedy of elegant and unrelieved blackness'

—— Sunday Telegraph

'Erudite and compelling... Genuinely hard to put down'

—— Sunday Times

'Wilson has always been a brilliant storyteller, who ­- unlike many of his no less famous contemporaries - is incapable of ever writing a boring line... Masterly... Always enthralling... Here is a book one races through, so eager is one to know what happens next... In [Wilson's] hands, as in James's, each turn of the screw succeeds in intensifying the reader's unease'

—— Francis King , Literary Review
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