cooper james fenimore the last of the mohicans

But, once I was one third into the book, I started to really enjoy it and, as the narrative became more and more complex, I became aware of how much the book and the movie differ.Īs the subtitle of the novel suggests, the story takes place in 1757, during the French and Indian War, and sees Hawk-eye and his Red Indian friends come to the rescue of Cora and Alice, the daughters of a British colonel fighting the French and their Native American allies for control over the North American colonies.

So, I set out to read Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans with a clear memory of what the characters and the setting looked like as I remembered them from Mann’s movie.ĭue to the text’s complexity and the author’s peculiar writing style, it took me quite a while to get into the story, thus reducing my reading speed considerably. I knew there were major differences between the book and the movie, but I couldn’t remember any of them. To be honest, I completely forgot what I had read in my abridged edition of The Last of the Mohicans and remembered the book mostly by what I had seen in the 1992 movie. Mark Twain tackles these issues (and many more) in his famous essay, Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, in which he claims that “Cooper has scored 114 offenses against literary art out of a possible 115.” Regardless of all the faults one can find in Cooper’s fiction, his masterpiece, The Last of the Mohicans, remains one of the most praised books of fiction about Native Americans. Funnily enough, The Deerslayer was the last book Cooper wrote in “Leatherstocking Tales” pentalogy which includes: The Deerslayer – The First War Path (1841), The Last of the Mohicans – A Narrative of 1757 (1826), The Pathfinder – The Inland Sea (1840), The Pioneers – The Sources of the Susquehanna A Descriptive Tale (1823), and The Prairie – A Tale (1827).Īlthough Cooper was a popular American writer whose books are still dissected in schools and university courses, his prose is very difficult to read due to elaborate descriptions and slow action.

In the meantime, I read The Deerslayer, the book that chronologically precedes the action of The Last of the Mohicans. I first read it in Romanian, in an abridge form, and many years later, in 1992, when I saw Michael Mann’s 1992 The Last of the Mohicans film adaptation (starring Daniel Day-Lewis in Hawk-eye’s role) I promised to myself that I would get my hands on the original text in English. Apart from Jules Verne’s books, The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper was the book that deeply marked my early teenage years.

Cooper james fenimore the last of the mohicans