- Title: The Prairie
- Author: J. Fennimore Cooper
- Publisher: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.
- Estimated year of printing: 1900
Notes:
No copyright or publishing dates given
The Prairie was first published in 1827, and is part of The Leatherstocking Tales. The Leatherstocking Tales is a series of 5 books set in the 1700’s which tell the story of a frontiersman in the Iroquois area of central New York. The most well known of the books is The Last of the Mohicans, which has since been adapted into movies and television shows. The Prairie is chronologically the fifth and final book, but was the third in publication order.
This book was challenging to date, as it contains no copyright or publication year. The publisher, Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., began publishing books in 1876 and was sold to Dun & Bradstreet in 1968, so that sets the earliest and latest possible years of publication. I found many copies of this book by this publisher in the range of 1890 – 1915, but none that had this exact binding. Through research, I found that this publisher was known to publish their books in many different bindings in order to appeal to different audiences. This copy is in a fine binding, likely intended as their higher-end edition. I came across a web page devoted to a different book by this same publisher, Lucile, which documents roughly 200 different editions of that book. Looking at those editions, one of them, Gladstone Edition (half calf), looks nearly identical to this binding, and was published between 1897 and 1912. I suspect that this copy is a similar Gladstone Edition of The Prairie, and so estimate a publishing year of circa 1900.
James Fennimore Cooper (1789 – 1851) was a popular American writer during the first half of the 19th century. He spent most of his childhood in Cooperstown, NY, which was founded by his father. He joined the Navy, which gave him the experiences that led to him writing his first bestselling novel, The Spy, in 1821.After The Spy, he started writing The Pioneers, the first of his Leatherstocking books, which would collectively go on to to be his most popular books.
Historical context:
When this book was published in 1900, William McKinley was President. This is the year in which the Galveston hurricane occurred, the deadliest natural disaster in United States history, and also the year that the Hershey company first sold their milk chocolate bar.