From the moment of its first publication in the 1820s and 1840s to the present day, James Fenimore Cooper's biography of Nathaniel Bumpo (also known by the nicknames St. John's Wort, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Long Carbine and Leather Stocking) has been consistently successful all over the world as one of the standards of fascinating adventure prose, the plots and characters of which once and they capture the reader's imagination forever. A dexterous hunter and a brave warrior, a selfless defender of the weak and oppressed, Leather Stocking has long and firmly entered the pantheon of the most popular heroes of world literature. This volume includes the first three novels of the cycle, which tell about the young and mature years of Nathaniel's life, about his friendship with the Indian delaware Chingachgook, about their skirmishes with the Hurons in the wilds and on the lake surface, about the deadly risk that friends take to rescue Chingachgook's beloved from captivity, to protect the Hutter family. ("St. John's Wort") and the rescue of the daughters of British Colonel Munro ("The Last of the Mohicans"), about the protagonist's love for the daughter of his longtime friend, Sergeant Thomas Dunham, and about his self-sacrifice in the name of someone else's happiness ("Pathfinder"). For the first time, the full text of St. John's Wort is published in Russian, and all the author's prefaces and notes to the novels and their later lifetime editions have been restored. The book, also for the first time in Russia, reproduces complete sets of illustrations for Cooper's novels created by English artists brothers Henry Matthew Brock and Charles Edmund Brock.