SOURCE: Johnson, Rochelle and Daniel Patterson. Introduction to Susan Fenimore Cooper: New Essays on Rural Hours and Other Works, edited by Rochelle Johnson and Daniel Patterson, pp. xi-xxvii. Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2001.

In the following excerpted introduction, Johnson and Patterson provide a detailed overview of Cooper's career, including a discussion of some of the author's more obscure works.

It was the tremendous swell of interest in environmental writing that provided the conditions needed for a new edition of Susan Fenimore Cooper's Rural Hours in 1998.¹ However, Cooper herself would not have missed the irony that our late-twentieth-century ability to appreciate her accomplishment as a nature writer was completely dependent upon our continued degradation of the planet. Nevertheless, that edition has brought Rural Hours more readers and Susan Cooper's career closer scrutiny by scholars. The breadth, complexity, and quality of her literary production have rewarded the investigations of...