Last of the Mohicans: A Dying Generation
The Last of the Mohicans is one of five novels in the Leatherstocking Series, all of which
were written by James Fenimore Cooper. Cooper is known to be "one of the nineteenth century's
most popular story tellers" because he "presented a simpler, idealized view of America's
westward migration" (Charles 392). Cooper was a pioneer of American literature. Writing
during the early to mid 1800's, Cooper is said to have "originated the American historical novel
and the tale of frontier life" (Haney 70). The Last of the Mohicans is categorized as a historical
romance because it incorporates the elements of a romance into the context of a historical event.
Throughout the novel Cooper explores such broad subjects as heredity and how it affects the
relationships between the characters. Also discussed in the novel are the interracial relationships
between Indians and whites and how these relationships have caused many of the characters to
loose a place in their culture and even brought entire races, such as the Mohican tribe, to
extinction. Binary Oppositions, such as pure blood versus mixed blood, noble Indian versus
savage Indian, and forest versus civilization are also apparent throughout this novel. Reading The
Last of the Mohicans, we see several archetypal characters who symbolically parallel the growth
of a nation, there by reflecting the time period in which the novel was written and the author's
James Fenimore Cooper was born on September 15, 1789, in Burlington, New Jersey.
When James was only fourteen months old, his father moved the family to Cooperstown, a small
village James' father founded near Otsego Lake. Cooper spent most of his youth playing around
the shores of Lake Otsego, near Cooperstown. Amid such "primitive frontier surroundings," he
came to know the trappers and Ind...