James Fenimore Cooper’s novel The Last of the Mohicans was published in 1826 by Carey and Lea of Philadelphia. It was the second novel in a five-novel series written by Cooper, published between 1823 and 1841, titled the “Leatherstocking Series.” Cooper wrote his novel in New York City, his family’s residence from 1822 to 1826, and after its initial success he decided to move them to England so that he could provide a better educational for his children and reap the benefits of his novel’s success over seas as well. Initially, the novel achieved a great reception among American readers at the time, despite having a steady decline in popularity over the years. Many critics praised Cooper for his novels at the time, including such authors as Victor Hugo and D. H. Lawrence. However, some critics disliked Cooper for his stylistic excesses and his overt sentimentality, most famous among these critics was Mark Twain. Despite all of this, The Last of the Mohicans has remained an American classic to this day, and can still be found in the occasional classroom and on the random bookshelf nation-wide.
The Last of the Mohicans is a novel that encompasses a few different literary genres that were popular with novels in America at the time of Cooper’s authorship. Many scholars consider the novel to be a mix of the historical novel, the romantic novel, the sentimental novel, and the frontier adventure novel. Often, to make things easier, some will call the novel a frontier romance in order to avoid confusion, which still sums up the novel’s genre to a certain extent. Copper is writing in a tradition that was very popular at the time; a tradition that used emotions and sentimentality, and the audience’s reactions to those emotions, in order to gain the reader’s interest in the story. This was ultimately a reaction against the previous Enlightenment movement that dominated American and English culture during the late 18th and early 19th centuries, which focused mainly on reason and logic in their works. Many people today find this literary genre to be a bit over the top for modern tastes today. However, this genre is still being studied and researched today, and some people can still find some sort of a connection with these stories, a fact that shows just how influential authors like James Fenimore Cooper can be.
Last
of the Mohicans 1992 Movie Trailer
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dn7UHJLcPp4)
This is a clip from the
1992 film version of The Last of the Mohicans. It was directed by Michael
Mann, distributed by 20th Century Fox, and starred Daniel Day-Lewis in the lead
role of Hawkeye. The film won the Best Sound Mixing Academy Award, and has been
often praised for its cinematography and music score (1).
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