Today's reader, geared to a modern tempo and coming again or coming fresh upon Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, may wonder what all the acclaim was and is about. For Cooper was a popular and financial success here in America, while his acknowledged eminence abroad led, long before his death, to translations in all the languages of Western Europe, plus those of Persia, Egypt, and Turkey. Hence, like Dickens' later, Cooper's work was often as popular overseas as at home. In 1828, for instance, the composer Franz Schubert, lying near death in Vienna, asked a friend to rush him Cooper's latest book in print; and nearly a century later, when in 1917 the United States entered World War I on the side of France, a Frenchman toasted his surprised American listeners by calling out, "The spirit of Leather-Stocking is awake!" Thus among the nicknames for Natty Bumppo (Deerslayer, Hawkeye, Pathfinder, Leather-Stocking, the trapper), Leather-Stocking became the common one attached to the character and to the series of five novels.
To appreciate the novel properly, the reader needs to remember something of the method of publication in Cooper's day. Like his other novels, The Last of the Mohicans was published in two volumes, a predetermined circumstance that partly accounts for the major division of the novel into two long chase sequences with a short intermediate stay of relative safety for the main characters at Fort William Henry. Herein is the big pattern of the book, based upon the suspenseful technique that Cooper made famous in novel after novel: pursuit-capture-escape-and-pursuit. The demands of publication, then, as well as the nature of his subject matter and his own propensities as a writer, are operative in this classic of patterned adventure.
