A Long False Start: The Rejected Chapters of Cooper's 'The Bravo' (1831).

Cooper's manuscript of The Bravo at the American Antiquarian Society, the nearly complete, bolograph rough draft of the entire novel, includes two chapters numbered by Cooper as XVIII and XLX (and the beginning of Chapter XX) that proved to be completely different from chapters 18 through 20 in the novel as published in 1831. This essay presents a diplomatic transcription of the two rejected chapters and the start of chapter XX, and speculates as to why Cooper rejected them in favor of the completely different chapters with which he replaced them.