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  • Published: 4 February 2014
  • ISBN: 9780451417862
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $12.99

The Last of the Mohicans




The most popular volume in Cooper's Leatherstocking saga, now in a beautiful new package.

James Fenimore Cooper’s classic American story of life on the frontier during the French and Indian War.
 
The Last of the Mohicans, one of the world’s great adventure stories, dramatizes how the birth of American culture was intertwined with that of Native Americans. In 1757, as the English and the French war over American territory, the frontier scout Hawkeye—Natty Bumppo—risks his life to escort two sisters through hostile Huron country. Hawkeye enlists the aid of his Mohican friends Chingachgook and Uncas, and together they battle deception, brutality, and death in a thrilling story of loyalty, moral courage, and love.
 
With an Introduction by Richard Hutson
and a New Afterword by Hugh C. MacDougall

  • Published: 4 February 2014
  • ISBN: 9780451417862
  • Imprint: Signet
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 464
  • RRP: $12.99

Other books in the series

On Sparta
Love
Annals
Military Dispatches

About the author

James Fenimore Cooper

James Fenimore Cooper was born on Septenber 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey, and grew up in the frontier village of Cooperstown, New Yorrk, in the heart of the wilderness he was to immortalize in his frontier novels. A high-spirited youth, he was expelled from Yale because of a prank and was finally signed by the navy by his strong-willed father. In 1819 a trfling incident reportedly led to the writing of his first book. Reading aloud to his wife from a popular English novel, he exclaimed, 'I could write you a better book myself!' The result was Precausion (1820), which followed in 1821 by his first real success, The Spy.

Cooper became a prolific writer, creating two unique genres that were to become staples in American literature–the sea romance and the frontier adventure story. The first of the famous Leatherstocking tales, The Pioneers, appeared in 1823 and introduced the wilderness scout Natty Bumppo. This detailed portrait of frontier life has been called the first truly American novel. In The Last of the Mohicans (1826) Natty Bumppo becomes the well-loved Hawkeye befriended by the noble Indian Chingachgook; the novel remains a favorite American classic. Other Leatherstocking tales were The Prairie (1827), The Pathfinder (1840) influenced both Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad and led to the use of the sea novel as vehicle for spiritual and moral explorations. Cooper also wrote political satire, romance, and the meticulously researched History of the Navy of the United States of America (1839). By the time of his death on September 14, 1851, he was considered America's 'national novelist.'

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Praise for The Last of the Mohicans

"In his immortal friendship of Chingachgook and Natty Bumppo [Cooper] dreamed the nucleus of a new society....A stark human relationship of two men, deeper than the deeps of sex. Deeper than property, deeper than fatherhood, deeper than marriage, deeper than Love." D. H. Lawrence

"The Last of the Mohicans raises again the question of the efficacy of human effort to control irrational forces at work in individual men, races, and nations. The question has never been more pertinent than now." James Franklin Beard