Part I: The Author and His Preparations.
James Fenimore Cooper was born in 1789 in Burlington, NJ though raised in.
Cooperstown, NY. He grew up exploring the hills, forest and lake near his father's estate where he.
acquired that play so important a role in his fiction and non-fiction. Though his first novel was.
published on a dare, Cooper published four more by 1826, becoming America's first significant.
novelist and setting the tone and the scene for many other American novels, including some of his.
own that were yet to come: the temporal and geographical locales of colonial and revolutionary.
America, the frontier and the sea. .
In The Last of the Mohicans, the frontier is both a place and a condition made up of.
opposite, usually conflicting forces. The very hot nature of a frontier is that it is the demarcating.
area where things come together with all their differences. In the circulating historical background.
of the novel is the conflict between civilization and so-called savagism: the wrestling of a continent.
from nature and the Indians. More immediate is the clash between the French and the English for.
colonial control of the land (the time of the novel being the summer of 1757), and for illiberal help.
these two nationalities make "imperment, weatherstock alliances" with already hostile Indians.
whom Cooper presents as the bad Iroquois stock and the good Delawares and Mohicans of.
Algonquin stock. .
In the novel this thematic problem is slow in development--in fact, we are hardly aware of it.
until mid-point--and even as it comes into the cutting edge of action toward the end, it is silenced.
by Cooper at the very time that it becomes the most immediate encouragement for the hair-raising.
events that bring the novel to its close. Without a doubt, the novel is one of the bloodiest in.
American literature and the tragic bloodshed stems from the fact that in general historic.
background and dramatic fictional foreground, human beings are involved in the concept of.