James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) published his first novel in 1820, and his last, thirty-second novel in 1850. During most of his three-decade career he was among the world’s most famous and, particularly in the 1820s, widely read writers. By the twentieth century he was best known as the author of The Leather-Stocking Tales, five novels about Natty Bumppo, a hunter, woodsman, and frontier warrior whose closest friendship is with Chingachgook, a chief of the dispossessed Delaware tribe. Variously called Leather-stocking, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and Deerslayer, Natty has often been cited as the first quintessentially American literary hero, and the Tales, set against historical contexts that range from the pre-Revolutionary fighting between England and France to the Lewis and Clark Expedition, have struck many as a kind of prose epic of early American life. Natty’s adventures in the woods are often drenched in violence and suspense. Cooper’s own heroism is harder to see, especially so long after the fact. We are used to thinking of the United States as the world’s great superpower, but when Cooper began writing the nation was still struggling with its status as a former colony of Great Britain, the superpower of that era. Cooper was the first American author to earn a living writing fiction, yet his work also reveals how much a postcolonial culture has to contend with in its quest for nationality.

Cooper’s first Leather-Stocking Tale was his third novel, The Pioneers, published in 1823. The story it tells begins on Christmas Eve, that moment on which for Christians human history pivots from the old world defined by Adam’s fall and Mosaic law to the new one brought forth by the birth of a savior who opens up the possibility of redemption. The setting is an upstate New York village called Templeton, which is based very closely on Cooperstown, the settlement founded by the novelist’s father in the 1780s and the scene of his own childhood. Natty appears in the book’s first chapter. This initial appearance gives little hint of the role he ended up playing in either Cooper’s career or American literature: he is an old man who soon disappears into the woods, while the narrative moves forward into the town where “the pioneers” are busy civilizing the wilderness.

During film's silent era between 1903 and 1927, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) was adapted for the screen nine times. Some of the nine made film history. The 1903 Edison–Porter version, which preceded even the same year's The Great Train Robbery (usually cited as the first American narrative film), was the first American movie adapted from a novel, and also the first to use titles. Vitagraph's 1910 version was the first dramatic movie longer than two reels: its three reels were shown one at a time on three different days. The 1914 World adaptation was probably the first feature film to feature an African-American (instead of a white actor in blackface) in a central role. Nine adaptations in twenty-five years is almost certainly a record, too. More significant, however, is what together these films have to say about cultural history as itself a process of continuous selective adaptation.

All nine were called Uncle Tom's Cabin:

1. Edison–Porter (1903, 1 reel)

2. Sigmund Lubin (1903, 1 reel)

3. Vitagraph (1910, 3 reels)

4. Thanhouser (1910, 1 reel)

5. Imp (1913, 3 reels)

6. Kalem (1913, 2 reels)

7. World (1914, 5 reels)

8. Famous Players-Lasky-Paramount (1918, 5 reels)

9. Universal (1927, 13 reels)

The five marked by asterisks have been lost. You can view versions of the remaining four at Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, an online resource that I have been building since 1998 to enable users to explore the story of Stowe's story as a cultural phenomenon.

Every reader has noticed how often Walt Whitman says I. There are few pages of Leaves of Grass without at least some form of the first-person pronoun - I, me, mine, my, myself. Nor is there any hint of an apology in his acknowledgment of this fact: “I know perfectly well my own egotism . . . and cannot say any less.” Yet I is not the pronoun that most markedly distinguishes Whitman's poetry (as C. Carroll Hollis has calculated, for example, “on a percentage basis Dickinson uses even more”). You is. Whitman doesn't say you as often as he says I, but he does use the second-person pronoun more pervasively than any other major poet. Even the assertion of his own egotism that I've just quoted is embedded in a larger thought that reveals the interdependence of his authorial I and the you of his reader:

To describe this awareness of and address to the reader, Hollis borrows a term from modern linguistics and calls it Whitman's “illocutionary” stance. Ezra Greenspan borrows a term from classical grammar and calls it Whitman's “vocative technique.” A more colloquial way to indicate the crucial place you occupies in many of Whitman's poems is to say that they are performances. Whitman put it still more colloquially when he wrote in a notebook: “All my poems do. All I write I write to arouse in you a great personality.” Of course, as performances they were enacted imaginatively rather than literally. Despite Whitman's fantasies about being a national orator, speaking from real stages to packed houses, he seldom performed in front of live audiences.