A novel of the first voyage of Columbus, written with the journal of Columbus before him, Mercedes of Castile was first published in 1840. James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) was an American novelist, travel writer, and social critic, regarded as the first great American writer of fiction. He was famed for his action-packed plots and his vivid, if somewhat idealized, portrayal of American life in the forest and at sea. "Every one knows that Columbus had seamen in his vessels, and that he brought some of the natives of the islands he had discovered with him to Spain. The reader is now made much more intimately acquainted with certain of these individuals, we will venture to say, than he can be possibly by the perusal of any work previously written." - J. Fenimore Cooper