The Last of the Mohicans

The second and most widely read of Cooper’s five Leatherstocking novels, set in 1757 during the Seven Years’ War as British and French armies fight for the northeast and the native nations allied to each are drawn in. The plot — two sisters escorted through contested forest by the frontiersman Hawkeye and his Mohican companions Chingachgook and Uncas — is a pursuit narrative, but the book’s lasting subject is the frontier itself and the displacement of the peoples already living on it.

Its handling of native characters is a long-standing scholarly argument: the novel both romanticises and writes off the peoples it depicts, and the “vanishing Indian” frame it helped popularise is part of why it is still taught and still contested.

Context: Listed under Adventure with a Lexile of 1350 — the top of the list’s range, and one of the harder entries in the adult band.

Connections

• A Library to Build Great Americans — the list this came from.
• James Fenimore Cooper — the author.
• The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea — his sea novel, two years earlier, also on the list.
• The Two Admirals — the third Cooper entry in the adult band.