The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757

Cooper wrote five "leather-stocking tales," of which this is the second and most famous. Here the white frontiersman Hawkeye (aka Peter Bumppo and Leather Stocking) is nobly matched with Uncas, the Indian of the title.

The feeling for nature and the excitement of the action are remarkable, no less so than Cooper's nostalgic view of the Indians and trappers who formed what he clearly thought of as a wilderness elite.