The Last of the Mohicans

This novel is the second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales and the one which has captured the imagination of generations since it was first published in 1826. Its success lies partly in the historical role Cooper gives to his Indian characters, against the grain of accumulated racial hostility, and partly in his evocation of the wild landscapes of North America which the French and British fought to control throughout the eighteenth century. At the centre of the novel is the celebrated 'Massacre' of British troops and their families by Indian allies of the French at Fort William Henry in 1757. Around this historical event, Cooper built a romantic fiction of captivity, sexuality, and heroism, in which the destiny of the Mohican Chingachgook and his son Uncas is inseparable from the lives of Alice and Cora Munro and of Hawk-eye the frontier scout.