Important novel in American history/literature. Good story, with empathy for both the Native American and European characters. That said, it is a Romantic novel, stuck in the style and biases of the time and of the genre. The writing is over-wrought, sometimes turgid, and often frustrating in its nineteenth century formalisms. I'm glad to have read it, but won't be reading any of the rest of the Leatherstocking series. ( )

James Fenimore Cooper's sweeping tale of the American frontier tells the romantic and tragic story of Hawkeye, Uncas, Magua and the Munroe sisters. These seemingly disparate lives become intertwined to create an American opera both tragic and vast in scale and emotion.

Set in 1757 during the fierce French and Indian War, this adventure follows an adroit scout and his companion as they weave through the lush and spectacular wilderness of upstate New York, fighting to save the beautiful daughters of a fort commander from a treacherous Huron renegade.

The story is a mix of adventure, romance, and historical drama, highlighting themes of cultural conflict and friendship. ( )

The principal character of The Last of the Mohicans 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.

The pivotal set piece of The Last of the Mohicans is the massacre at Fort William Henry during the internecine French and Indian War, as the North American portion of the worldwide Seven Years’ War was known. 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 created a template for much American popular fiction, particularly the western. Frontiersman Natty Bumppo, whom the French call La Longue Carabine (the long rifle), had already been introduced as an old man in Cooper’s The Pioneers (1823); here he appears in middle age, as Hawkeye, a scout working for the British, along with Chingachgook and his son, Uncas, two respected members of the Mohican tribe of the Hudson River valley in the British colony of New York who become his companions. Having crossed paths with Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a British colonel who are betrayed by their Huron guide, a wily warrior named Magua, Bumppo 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 peoples who inhabit it, but all are shown to succumb inevitably to progress, typical of the ideology of 19th-century America. ( )