The second of Cooper's five Leatherstocking Tales, this is the one which has consistently 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 beautiful landscapes of North America which the French and the 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 Mohicans Chingachgook and his son Uncas is inseparable from the lives of Alice and Cora Munro and of Hawkeye the frontier scout. The controlled, elaborate writing gives natural pace to the violence of the novel's action: like the nature whose plundering Copper laments, the books placid surfaces conceal inexplicable and deathly forces.
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The first great hero in American fiction - in the first true American epic! Across the Eastern Wilderness rages the French and Indian War - with only a handful of English and Colonial troops standing in the path of the relentless army of General Montcalm and his fierce Iroquois allies. But arrayed against the invaders are Hawkeye, the fabled frontier scout, and his noble friends Chingachgook and Uncas, the only two survivors of the Mohican tribe. The Last of the Mohicans is a tale of bravery and barbarism, of heroism amid the horrors of the final great war fought between the British and the French - and their Indian allies - for a land destined one day to seize its freedom in its own hands. James Fenimore Cooper's famous novel has been adapted with all its legendary excitement intact by award-winning writer Roy Thomas, and artists Steven Kurth and Denis Medri. Collects Marvel Illustrated: Last of the Mohicans #1-6.
