The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper - Part One - Introduction and Chapter 1

The second, and arguably most famous, of James Fenimore Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, "The Last of the Mohicans; A Narrative of 1757," has consistently captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826.

The success of the novel lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his native Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and partly in his evocation of the wild beautiful landscapes of North America which the French and the British fought to control throughout the eighteenth century.

At the center of the novel is the celebrated `Massacre' of British troops and their families by Indian allies of the French at Fort William Henry in 1757. Around this historical event, Cooper built a romantic fiction of captivity, sexuality, and heroism, in which the destiny of the Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas is inseparable from the lives of Alice and Cora Munro and of Hawkeye the frontier scout.

Cooper's elaborate writing gives natural pace to the violence of the novel's action: like the nature whose plundering Copper laments, the books placid surfaces conceal inexplicable and deathly forces.

Over time the book grew to be regarded by some as the first Great American Novel.

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