Last week in this space we looked at my nominations for representative novels about various regions of our Empire State… western New York, Rochester, Southern Tier, and the Finger Lakes. Now we’re ready to move on!

For CENTRAL NEW YORK, where else would we turn but to the “Leatherstocking” novels of James Fenimore Cooper? The Deerslayer (1841) and The Pioneers (1823) in particular are set around Lake Otsego, with The Pathfinder (1840) on Lake Ontario and The Last of the Mohicans (1826) around Lake George.

“J. F.” was a Cooper of Cooperstown, giving him plenty of local color in his settings, and he had a fine rich imagination. Even given the fact that the novel was just being invented, we wince a lot reading them – Mark Twain was scathing, a couple of generations later. But Cooper was perhaps America’s first novelist, and he concentrated on American settings, American characters, and American themes.

He also created Natty Bumppo, “born by the seashore” but living his life in the great forest, and ending it on the faraway prairie. Untutored, but deeply read in the book of nature, drawing his morality from nature, never settling down, Natty moves west with the frontier. John Wayne never would have existed without Natty Bumppo. But Natty Bumppo did it far, far better.

For the MOHAWK VALLEY, of course we turn to Drums Along the Mohawk (1936), by Walter D. Edmonds. The 1939 movie’s exciting, but it doesn’t do the book justice. The Mohawk was pretty much the limit of white settlement/invasion in the days leading up to the American Revolution, and as such became a lightning rod when fighting broke out. Fictional and historical characters weave in and out of fictional and historical events, in a novel that pioneers in facing the complexities and contradictions of private and public life in those dramatic days – rather than just wrapping it all in a flag.

Speaking of complexities, conflicts, and contradictions… for the CHAMPLAIN VALLEY, challenge yourself with Kenneth Roberts’s 1933 Rabble in Arms, which revolves around that great American hero – Benedict Arnold.

And so he was, once… as the narrator says, “He was a bright and shining sword in the days when America’s swords were oh, so few.” Having been driven away from Quebec after an overland anabasis from Maine, Arnold builds a fleet from scratch on Lake Champlain, ambushes the British fleet and fights a successful delaying action against them, then later joins forces with General Gates to lead two successful battles at Saratoga, ending in the capture of an entire British army… perhaps the turning point of the Revolution. (In 1957, the Kenneth Roberts received a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation for his novels… the previous recipient had been Carl Sandburg, almost forty years earlier.)

It’s kind of interesting that Rabble in Arms, Drums Along the Mohawk, and Carl Carmer’s Genesee Fever (in last weeks blog) all came out between 1933 and 1941. All of them are big, sweeping, “warts and all” frontier novels, from a time of vast crisis when a transforming America was groping for its roots, but was also beginning to face its crimes. And all of them, of course, are rooted in Fenimore Cooper’s works, although very different from them.

Stay tuned, there’s more to come, but let me ask this: has anyone yet written the Haudenosaunne novel? Has the Haudenosaunne James Baldwin, Sherman Alexie, Sholem Aleichem yet found his or her voice? If not, then speed the day.