The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea

Cooper’s 1824 sea novel, set during the American Revolution and built around a raid on the English coast by a pilot figure modelled on John Paul Jones. Cooper wrote it after arguing that Scott’s The Pirate had not been written by anyone who knew ships; he had served before the mast in the merchant marine and then as a midshipman in the Navy, and set out to show the difference, and the book is usually credited with founding the sea-adventure novel as an American form.

It earns a place in a curriculum meant to form citizens mostly as founding-era myth-making: a story about improvised seamanship and divided loyalty written by the first American novelist to take the young republic’s own history as his subject.

Context: A December 2025 Substack curriculum’s Adventure shelf, which leans heavily on Cooper — three of his novels appear in the adult band.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• James Fenimore Cooper — the author, and the most-repeated novelist on the adult list.
• The Last of the Mohicans — his best-known novel, also on the list.
• The Two Admirals — his other naval novel on the list, written seventeen years later.