Le Dernier des Mohicans (The Last of the Mohicans) Book

What can one say about Cooper? His historical imagination is profound, his creative use of the gothic landscape is uniquely American, and his influence on plot and characterization in American fiction--including, I recently discovered, South American fiction--is pervasive and extensive. Yet his diction is so often trite, his style so plodding and crabbed, his syntax so convoluted, that it is difficult to read more than a few pages of "The Last of the Mohicans" without throwing the book across the room in disgust.

That's a pity, for Cooper helped shape an early and influential interpretation of American history--later adopted by the narrative historian (and formidable literary stylist) Francis Parkman--that combines an elegiac appreciation for a disappearing wilderness, a wilderness which helped to shape and define the American character, with a critical examination of how that character in its turn formed the emerging democratic state. He shows us how Protestant middle class English values are more suited to egalitarianism than the aristocrat instincts of the Catholic French, and embodies this egalitarianism and spirit of the wilderness in the character of the scout "Hawkeye."

Hawkeye is an offshoot of Protestant New England, raised in the forest and purged of the petty theological distractions of Christianity (the "man without a cross"). He knows the secrets of the wilderness and appreciates Native Americans just as they are, acknowledging both their nobility and their savagery. He also understands the British soldiers and settlers, but, although he can move effortlessly between the two worlds, he is never completely comfortable in either. He lends his talents to others, but, remaining a solitary even in communion, he cuts his own path through the trees.

There you have it : America's first Western hero, the father of such true-hearted stalwarts as dime novel Buffalo Bill and radio's The Lone Ranger, as well as the sire of such complicated incarnations as John Wayne's Ethan Edwards and Clint Eastwood's Will Munny. And let's not forget such bastard offspring as Cormac McCarthy's Judge Holden and Ishmael Reed's The Loop Garoo Kid.

Quite a legacy indeed! If only his books weren't so badly written, his originality and vision would have earned him a place in the American pantheon right up there with Hawthorne and Poe.