The Last Of The Mohicans
Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Barnes and Nobles, Inc.,
1993, 423 p.
Part I: The Author and His Preparations
James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789 in Burlington, NJ though raised in
Cooperstown, NY. He grew up exploring the hills, forest and lake near his father?s estate where he
acquired that play so important a role in his fiction and non-fiction. Though his first novel was
published on a dare, Cooper published four more by 1826, becoming America?s first significant
novelist and setting the tone and the scene for many other American novels, including some of his
own that were yet to come: the temporal and geographical locales of colonial and revolutionary
America, the frontier and the sea.
In The Last of the Mohicans, the frontier is both a place and a condition made up of
opposite, usually conflicting forces. The very hot nature of a frontier is that it is the demarcating
area where things come together with all their differences. In the circulating historical background
of the novel is the conflict between civilization and so-called savagism: the wrestling of a continent
from nature and the Indians. More immediate is the clash between the French and the English for
colonial
novel, magua, indians, cora, hawkeye, uncas, mohicans, frontier, french, english, cooper, through, upon, out, munro, last, hurons, heyward, between, two, time, place, nature, huron, gamut, fort, escape, condition, very, part, next, important, delawares, american, alice, after
