Given your status as an American Western icon, you may be interested to learn about the literary concepts and attributes that contributed to the development of the genre to which you are most closely associated. To that end, I present James Fenimore Cooper's novel The Deerslayer as one of the first examples of contemporary Western stories of the kind you made films about. Cooper's novel features a masculine, principled protagonists, an obsession with the beauty of the Old West, and plots that emphasize the danger of these surroundings.
The main character of Natty Bumppo, the "Deerslayer," is not unlike the ...
