Oak Openings: Novel (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781790100071)

The Oak Openings; or, The Bee Hunter is an 1848 novel by James Fenimore Cooper. The novel focuses on the activities of professional honey-hunter Benjamin Boden, nicknamed "Ben Buzz." The novel is set in Kalamazoo, Michigan's Oak Opening, a wooded prairie that still exists in part today, during the War of 1812.Background and publication historyAfter returning from his European travels in the 1830s, Cooper was persuaded by his niece's husband, Horace H. Comstock, to invest in Michigan real estate. The Potawatomi had ceded much of their land in central Michigan by 1833 and their former territory became known as "oak-openings." By 1837, Cooper's $6,000 investment was losing value, though he watched as his fellow New Yorkers attempted to colonize the area like honeybees. The experience inspired The Oak Openings; or, The Bee Hunter, and the novel became one of the first representations of Beekeeping in American literature.Though not the first author to use the term "oak openings," Frederick Marryat did so, Cooper popularized the term for the type of oak clad Savannah with the publication of the novel.The novel is Cooper's last "wilderness novel" following his Leatherstocking Tales and serves as a melancholy follow-up to that series.It is also the last of his novels to explore the relationships between Europeans and Native Americans in the early American expansion...James Fenimore Cooper (September 15, 1789

Author: James Fenimore Cooper
ISBN-10: 1790100070
ISBN-13: 9781790100071
Publisher: Independently Published
Language: English
Published: 11/20/2018
Pages: 258
Format: Paperback
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 10.00h x 8.00w x 0.54d