The Last of the Mohicans

It is 1757, the third year of the war between Britain and France for North America, and the daughters of Colonel Munro, dark, steady Cora and fragile Alice, are being escorted through the forest to join their father at Fort William Henry. Their guide betrays them: Magua, a Huron with an old and specific grievance against Munro, means to take his revenge through his daughters. Into the gap step the scout Hawkeye and his two Mohican companions, the chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas, last of their line. What follows is pursuit, capture and rescue run at full speed through gorges, caves and waterfalls, around the historical siege and surrender of the fort and the massacre that followed it, to an ending that refuses the rescues adventure fiction promises: Cora and Uncas both die, and the old chief is left what the title says he is.

Cooper's prose is the honest obstacle. It is formal, heavily upholstered and slow by modern standards, and Mark Twain's demolition of it in 1895 remains one of the funniest essays in American criticism. Push through anyway. The landscape writing helped make the American wilderness a literary subject, the chase structure underneath the upholstery is genuinely relentless, and Magua is a villain with a real argument. The book's romantic image of the vanishing Indian shaped and distorted American ideas for a century, which is part of what a modern reader is reading.

Published in February 1826, the second of the Leatherstocking Tales, it was an immediate success and became one of the most widely read American novels of the nineteenth century.