The Last of the Mohicans

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James Fenimore Cooper

Literature

Jul 31, 2018

In the pages of this classic adventure tale you’ll meet one of the greatest heroes in American literature, Nathaniel Bumppo, a rugged scout and woodsman who goes by any number of nicknames, among them Natty, Leatherstocking, Pathfinder, Deerslayer, and Hawkeye. The Last of the Mohicans is the second in the series of five Leatherstocking Tales that James Fenimore Cooper wrote about Natty; it followed The Pioneers, a portrait of frontier life at the end of the nineteenth century in which Bumppo appears as an old man. The character in the first novel proved so popular that Cooper brought him back, this time in the prime of life. Cooper’s exciting, action-packed yarns helped shaped the romantic notion of the pre-Revolutionary American wilderness as a stage for nobility of character and resourceful courage. Although not always historically accurate, they do imbue the uncorrupted forest with an imaginative promise that reflects the overwhelming power the unsettled continent had in shaping the fears and fortunes of the early colonists. That promise found no better embodiment than Natty Bumppo, and Natty had no better adventure than The Last of the Mohicans.

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