In the Edinburgh Review for January 1820, Sydney Smith, the British denouncer of everything American, wrote disdainfully: "In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" At the time, he was in general right, but by 1826, when The Last of the Mohicans was published, an honest appraisal would have been very different indeed. And no writer from the Americas was more responsible for the change than James Fenimore Cooper, whose novels were becoming about as widely read as were those of Sir Walter Scott, who has been credited as an influence on Cooper and with whom Cooper has often been compared. In order to extend a deserved appreciation to The Last of the Mohicans, the student will want to keep in mind two broad aspects of Cooper's unique situation as an American author: his status as a literary founding father and his native subject matter.
Cooper has rightly been called the first American novelist. Not that he wrote the first novel in the United States: that was William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy (1789). Neither was he the first to concentrate on the form of the novel, for in a remarkably short and productive period (1798-1801) Charles Brockden Brown had earlier turned out half a dozen full novels. But Cooper is properly heir to the title because he was the first American to make a life-long and successful career of writing novels and because his settings were mostly those of the New World, encompassing its social, political, and pioneer characteristics. Far more than any other writer up to his time, he fictionally presented the new nation and its background to the whole world, sometimes idealizing and sometimes criticizing.
