The Last of the Mohicans, in full The Last of the Mohicans:, the second and most popular novel of the Leatherstocking Tales by James Fenimore Cooper, first published in two volumes. In terms of narrative order, it is also the second novel in the series, taking place during the French and Indian War.
SUMMARY: Its principal character is Natty Bumppo, also called Hawkeye, now in middle life and at the height of his powers. The story tells of brutal battles with the Iroquois and their French allies, cruel captures, narrow escapes, and revenge. The beauty of the unspoiled wilderness and sorrow at its disappearance, symbolized in Hawkeye’s Mohican friends, the last of their tribe, are important themes of the novel.
DETAIL: The pivotal set piece of The Last of the Mohicans is the massacre at Fort William Henry during the French and Indian War. This is the “factual” event around which Cooper, the first internationally renowned American novelist, builds a compelling tale of wilderness adventure. Drawing heavily on the American genre of the Native American captivity narrative, he creates a template for much American popular fiction, particularly the western. Frontiersman Natty Bomppo had already been introduced as an old man in The Pioneers;6 here he appears in middle age, as Hawkeye, a scout working for the British, with two Delaware Native American companions, Chingachgook and his son, Uncas. Having crossed paths with Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a British colonel, Bomppo and friends spend the rest of the novel rescuing them from captivity, escorting them to safety, or pursuing them through the wilderness. Cooper’s racial politics are conservative; though the novel raises the possibility of interracial romance between Uncas and the genteel Cora (who has a black mother), the prospect is quashed. Cooper laments the destruction of the wilderness, and of the Native Americans who inhabit it, but all are shown to succumb inevitably to
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6 James Fenimore Cooper (April 1, 2005). "The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea".
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progress, typical of the ideology of nineteenth-century America.
The Prairie, novel by James Fenimore Cooper, published in two volumes in 1827, the third of five novels published as The Leatherstocking Tales. Chronologically, The Prairie is the fifth in the series, ending with the death of the octogenarian frontiersman Natty Bumppo, called Hawkeye.
The Prairie extols the vanishing American wilderness, disappearing because of the westward expansion of the American frontier. It concerns Natty Bumppo’s travels with a party of settlers across the unsettled prairie of the Great Plains. Bumppo ultimately rejects life with the settlers and goes to live out his days in a Pawnee village, away from the encroaching civilization he distrusts.
Natty Bumppo, fictional character, a mythic frontiersman and guide who is the protagonist of James Fenimore Cooper’s five novels of frontier life that are known collectively as The Leatherstocking Tales. The character is known by various names throughout the series, including Leather-Stocking, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, and Deerslayer.
Natty Bumppo, a young white man who was raised by Delaware Indians and educated by members of a Moravian sect, is a brave and honourable woodsman, hunter, and interpreter. He is a lifelong friend of Chingachgook, a Mohican chief, and his son Uncas. In the course of the series, Natty Bumppo allies himself with various European pioneer and military factions as well as with his Indian brothers. Throughout the series he is associated with the vanishing wilderness as an idealized figure, wifeless and childless, hauntingly loyal to a doomed way of life.
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