"Todd's voice is extraordinary, rich and deep."KLIATT

The Deerslayer is the first of the Leather-Stocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper.
Natty Bumppo is a young man living in upstate New York in the early 1740s. Bumppo,
called Deerslayer, and his friend Hurry Harry approach Lake Glimmerglass, or Otsego, where
the trapper Thomas Hutter lives with his daughters, the beautiful Judith and the feeble-minded
Hetty. Hutter's floating log fort is attacked by Iroquois Indians, and the two frontiersmen join
in the fight.

James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851), the first major American novelist, was the son of a wealthy landowner who founded Cooperstown, New York. He attended Yale and served in the navy before turning to writing with Precaution (1820), but it was his second book, The Spy (1821), that brought him international fame. After he wrote The Pioneers (1823), public fascination with the character of Natty Bumppo and his use of the American landscape led him to write a series of sequels that gradually unfold the entire life of the frontier scout. The books' popularity reflected the growing interest in the clash between savagery and civilization on the frontier.

Raymond Todd is an actor-director in the theater, a poet, a jazz trombonist, and a documentary filmmaker who lives in New York.