The Prairie noble death and bury him. In the spirit of Daniel Boone, who is said to have thought "a population of ten to the square mile inconveniently crowded," "The Prairie" incorporates the historical phenomenon of the migration of settlers into the territories of the Louisiana Purchase. "The trapper" exemplifies frontiersmen like Daniel Boone in his quest for the wide open spaces of the American west. The Ishmael Bush party is an early wagon train. Novelist and social critic James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851) was the first major American writer to deal imaginatively with American life, notably in his five "Leatherstocking Tales". He
The Canterbury Tales of Dante and Virgil in "The Divine Comedy". New research suggests that the General Prologue, in which the innkeeper and host Harry Bailey introduces each pilgrim, is a pastiche of the historical Harry Bailey's surviving 1381 poll-tax account of Southwark's inhabitants. "The Decameron" by Giovanni Boccaccio contains more parallels to "The Canterbury Tales" than any other work. Like the "Tales", it features a number of narrators who tell stories along a journey they have undertaken (to flee from the Black Death). It ends with an apology by Boccaccio, much like Chaucer's Retraction to the "Tales". A quarter of the tales