In early 1975 the world of Chicago politics was stunned by the news that former Cook County State's Attorney Benjamin S. Adamowski had endorsed Mayor Richard J. Daley for a sixth term of office. Adamowski and Daley had long been opponents and their rivalry had dominated Chicago politics from the mid-1950s through the mid-1960s. In 1960 it had even spilled over into the arena of presidential politics where it affected the closest and most controversial presidential election of the twentieth century.

In his poem to the hesitating purchaser of Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson names Cooper among the great romancers he has emulated, describing him as “ Cooper of the wood and wave.” That phrase names both the aspect of Cooper's work which interests me, the adventure novels, and the major subdivision of that aspect. I am not, that is, going to discuss the non-fiction, and among the fiction I am not going to discuss the Effingham or the Littlepage novels, nor even the historical novels as such. I'm going to concentrate upon the Leatherstocking saga, seen as forest books, and upon sea fiction like Afloat and Ashore, The Pilot, and The Sea Lions. I want to point out differences between the two sub-genres in fictional art and fictional success, and to try to explain those differences in terms of social and political forces. But I also want to stress the unity of the two, which is to say Cooper's identity as an adventure novelist. Because we lack a critical vocabulary for that genre, critics have, it seems to me, failed to take proper account of one of the major forms and forces of our literature. And this is particularly unfortunate in American Studies, because adventure has been so large a part of American culture.

Robert Munford, the eighteenth-century Virginia squire and litterateur, has long served as both a symbol and subject of analysis for students of colonial American history and culture. In the nearly-barren ground of eighteenth-century American drama, Munford's plays, The Candidates and The Patriots, while never actually produced on stage during his lifetime, stand out as two of the most important attempts by a colonial American to use traditional dramatic techniques to illustrate distinctively American characters and themes. And for historians, these same two plays, which grew out of Munford's own experience in Virginia politics, have served as rich and evocative sources from which to reconstruct the operation and ethos of the political culture of revolutionary Virginia.

“ What is he? ” murmurs one gray shadow of my forefathers to the other. “ A writer of story-books ! What kind of business in life, what mode of glorifying God, or being serviceable to mankind in his day and generation, may that be? ” (Hawthorne, “ The Custom-House”

When William Ferguson, an English botanist and entomologist, called at the Detroit home of General Lewis Cass in June 1855, it was natural that during “ a very lengthened and interesting conversation,” the veteran American politician should mention “ the absurd books ” written by British travellers about the United States. “ They come over here,” said Cass, “ run over the country for three months, and think they understand it.” Such sentiments, of course, were commonplace by this time and Ferguson could not have been surprised by the frankness with which they were elucidated. Cass had reached political maturity during a period in which the British traveller became the focus for intense and hostile speculation in the United States. There was no more appropriate target for Jacksonian wrath, for example, than Mrs. Frances Trollope. Her Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832 and widely extracted in American newspapers, helped give broad popular legitimacy to the bitter critical dialogues which pervaded the Anglo-American intellectual community after 1815. During the Jacksonian period, therefore, the British traveller could claim an important role in the development of Atlantic perceptions and attitudes.