![]() It was Cooper's most successful book to date, and carried his reputation abroad: "In Europe the book produced quite a startling effect," recalled his daughter, the author Susan Fenimore Cooper. LAST OF THE MOHICANS is a historical novel set during the French and Indian War in 1757, and based in part on Cooper's understanding of the Mohican tribe, part of the Eastern Algonquian family that were forcibly relocated west in the decade after this book's publication. Even those who disliked his work, like Mark Twain, owe him a debt (which Twain well knew): as Wayne Franklin puts it, "without Cooper, there could have been no Mark Twain" (xxii). In defining the path for future writers, Cooper laid the groundwork for American masterpieces like Hawthorne's SCARLET LETTER and Melville's MOBY-DICK. His works sought to build a uniquely American tradition, and his books' sales went a long way towards doing so. ![]() Cooper was perhaps the most significant popularizer of "key forms of American fiction - the Western, the sea tale, the Revolutionary romance" (Franklin, xi). One of the earliest writers born in the United States to achieve success on an international scale, Cooper has had a formative influence on the path of American literature that is difficult to overstate. First printing, first issue of this classic of US literature, a major influence on the development of the Western, American Romanticism, and North American-set historical fiction. ![]()
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