Produced by David Starner, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.) TALES FOR FIFTEEN BY JAMES FENIMORE COOPER (1823) A FACSIMILE REPRODUCTION WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY JAMES FRANKLIN BEARD _Clark University_ GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA SCHOLARS' FACSIMILES & REPRINTS 1959 SCHOLARS' FACSIMILES & REPRINTS 118 N.W. 26TH STREET GAINESVILLE, FLORIDA, U.S.A. HARRY R. WARFEL, GENERAL EDITOR REPRODUCED FROM A COPY IN AND WITH THE PERMISSION OF YALE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY L.C. CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 59-6525 MANUFACTURED IN THE U.S.A. LETTERPRESS BY J. N. ANZEL, INC. PHOTOLITHOGRAPHY BY EDWARDS BROTHERS BINDING BY UNIVERSAL-DIXIE BINDERY INTRODUCTION On 1 February 1823 Charles Wiley published in New York _The Pioneers_, a new book by the author of _The Spy_; by noon he had sold 3,500 copies--a record-making sale by the bookselling standards of the time. On 26 June, almost five months later, Wiley quietly offered, as we know from a notice in The Patriot, a New York newspaper, "_Tales for Fifteen, or Imagination and Heart_, an original work in one volume, by Jane Morgan, price 75c." The actual author was the author of _The Spy_; and the two stories, "Imagination" and "Heart," were obviously imitations of Mrs. Amelia Opie's popular moral tales, published, as the paper cover noted, when _The Spy_ was in its fourth edition, _The Pioneers_ in its third, and _The Pilot_ in press. The sale was so small that only four copies are known to be extant. Why, one may ask, did James Cooper, who was in 1823 a writer of national and international reputation, publish this volume of imitative stories for adolescent girls, even though his identity was carefully concealed? According to Cooper's own account, _Tales for Fifteen_ was written and given to Charles Wiley as a gesture of friendship to help the publisher out of financial difficulties. This explanation was echoed by the novelist's daughter Susan in a letter reprinted from the Cooperstown _Freeman's Journal_ in _The Critic_ on 12 October 1889. It is true that Wiley was having financial troubles in 1823, and Cooper undoubtedly gave him the proceeds from _Tales for Fifteen_; but to suppose, as full acceptance of this explanation requires, that Cooper reverted, even momentarily, to the repudiated literary models of his first book _Precaution_ after the phenomenal success of _The Spy_ would be to infer in him an almost total want of critical judgment and common sense. The real explanation, which Cooper might have been embarrassed to furnish and which the chronology of publication has obscured, lies in a hitherto unsuspected phase of the curious story of Cooper's entrance to authorship.