Tales for Fifteen: or, Imagination and Heart.
by James Fenimore Cooper (writing under the
pseudonym of "Jane Morgan")





{This text has been transcribed and annotated from
a facsimile of the original edition (New York: C.
Wiley, iv, 223 pp., 1823) by Hugh C. MacDougall,
Secretary of the James Fenimore Cooper Society
, who welcomes corrections or
emendations. Only a handful of copies of the
original edition have survived. The standard Cooper
bibliography makes brief mention of an edition
published in Guernsey, Maryland (n.d.), but I have
never seen any further reference to it. Forty years
ago a facsimile of the Wiley edition was published
(Delmar, NY: Scholar's Facsimiles and Reprints,
1959, reprinted 1977), with an introduction by
James Franklin Beard. At least one microfilm
version is also available, but "Tales for Fifteen"
remains one of James Fenimore Cooper's least read
and least known writings.}

{In 1840, when the Boston publisher George
Roberts asked Cooper for a contribution to a new
magazine, Cooper responded that he could reprint
"Tales for Fifteen" if he could find a copy--Cooper