James Fenimore Cooper

As Sarah Palin "aw-shucks-ed" her way through Thursday's debate, she repeatedly played the one card that has become her stock in trade: She is a real American. Her rural roots, her lack of sophistication and worldliness, her bare bones education, her...

By Nick Owchar Like many an excellent chronicler of village life, Lauren Groff gives us early in "The Monsters of Templeton" (Voice/Hyperion: 364 pp., $24.95) an ensemble view of the citizens of Templeton, a place very closely modeled on Cooperstown, N....

What might "Ismail Ax" mean? One theory spreading across the Web speculates that it comes from a story in the Quran, the holy book of Islam, about Ibrahim and his son, Ismail. In Islam, Ibrahim is the father of the prophets and, upset that people in his...

With the 2007 Wrangler Unlimited Rubicon, Natty Bumppo has traded his buckskins for some designer jeans. Yes, Natty Bumppo, hero of James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales," the great woody prose of which has prompted many an undergraduate to...

Bolton Landing, N.Y. The Adirondacks, land of long lakes and last Mohicans, do their big business in the summer, when upstate New York gets its meager annual allotment of warm weather. The forest-fringed waterways and low mountains leap to life as...

To really appreciate Sag Harbor's literary tradition, you have to do what the writers who have called this East End village home have been doing for almost two centuries: Use your imagination. "Imagine what this looked like a century-and-a-half ago,"...

Here are a few of the members of Sag Harbor's "Literary Roundtable," figuratively speaking. Houses and other places associated with most of these writers are included in Anthony Garro's historical walking tour, held in conjunction with Sag Harbor's...

It is the pleasant nature of this quaint little upstate village that makes it so easy to overlook the disconnect between truth and legend that allowed it to become the hometown of baseball history. If baseball wasn't invented here, it should have been....

On this stellar spring day, the emerald slope above the rail tracks is a bovine fantasy of grasses nurtured by nitrogenated soil - the lazy kind of place where you might nap or linger over some sunny novel. But for artist Andrew Wyeth, the hill of the...

The artists in the Hudson River School didn't have to dream up the landscapes they painted. Surrounded by the Catskills, they found inspiration in placid creeks and cascading waterfalls framed by trees turning vivid gold and red. Many of the places...

Where: 252 miles, 4 3/4 hours, on Lake Otsego in central New York State. Why: Leatherstocking Country town made famous by author James Fenimore Cooper. Baseball Hall of Fame, opened 1939, 888-425-5633, www.baseballhalloffame.org; Farmers Museum, 19th-...

OUT OF THE BLUE one spring day in 1887, the bedridden poet Walt Whitman received a surprising letter from two ardent admirers in northern England. By no means were John Johnston and J.W. Wallace run-of-the-mill poetry enthusiasts. They were fervid....