James Fenimore Cooper with Dr. Wayne Franklin

Christians Reading Classics · Jun 11, 2026 · 1h 4m · transcript

James Fenimore Cooper gets filed away as “important” long before many of us actually read him, and that gap is the problem we wanted to solve. I’m joined by Dr. Wayne Franklin, one of the leading Cooper scholars and the author of major biographies of Cooper, to talk about what makes a classic live past its own pages. His definition sticks with me: a classic is a book that, once you start it, you realize you already know, because it has permeated the culture and taught later writers what stories can look like.

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Christians Reading Classics is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is…