The Last of the Mohicans
The classic tale of Hawkeye—Natty Bumppo—the frontier scout who turned his back on "civilization," and his friendship with a Mohican warrior as they escort two sisters through the dangerous wilderness of Indian country in frontier America.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
4people
2016–2025years
25% recommend75% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I would add:
0. 'McTeague' by Frank Norris.
1. All The Kings Men, Robert Penn Warren.
2. Most novels by Sinclair Lewis.
3. Novels of John O Hara
4. Sister Carrie, Theodore Dresier.
5. Little Big Man by Thomas Berger.
6. Last of the Mohicans by Fenimore Cooper.
- For a couple of different reasons.
The first is literary merit: reading Harry Potter is a great deal more enjoyable than reading Bechdolt's book. Rowling may not be Homer or Shakespeare, and there are things about her books that could be better, but reading them has been an extremely popular activity since they were first published. I suspect that, if there are people in 200 years, less of them will read Rowling than do today. But there are still people reading works first published 200 years ago today, even fictional works. Pride and Prejudice was published in 01813, Frankenstein was first published in 01818, Rip Van Winkle was published in 01819, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow was published in 01820, The Last of the Mohicans was published in 01826, Self-Reliance was published in 01841, The Cask of Amontillado was published in 01846. Maybe Rowling doesn't rise to the level of Austen, but I'd definitely put her above Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper.
The second is that the humans, unable to think about the world directly, instead think in terms of narratives and metaphors, and they get these narratives and metaphors from the stories that other humans tell, which are necessarily more or less fictional, even when they attempt to describe reality. In order to understand human culture, then, there is no replacement for understanding those stories. Harry Potter, like Rambo, The Matrix, and Frankenstein, supplies metaphors and narratives through which nearly everyone today interprets the world around them, even if they haven't read it themselves; and its influence will continue as long as there are people.
If you want to understand how English-speaking people thought 200 years ago, or how people think today, you should read Frankenstein, among other things. And if someone in 200 years wants to understand how people think today, they should also read Harry Potter.
This is obvious sometimes when people use words from the books—Muggles, horcrux, mudblood—but it also happens in a much subtler and more pervasive way.
Bechdolt's book just doesn't have the same kind of importance.
- Also see Mark Twain's "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offences"[1], reviewing some of the works of James Fenimore Cooper (of "The Last of the Mohicans" fame).
A sample:
[1] - http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3172/3172-h/3172-h.htmIn his little box of stage properties he kept six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of the moccasined enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently was his broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn’t step on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril, and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is sure to step on a dry twig. There may be a hundred handier things to step on, but that wouldn’t satisfy Cooper. Cooper requires him to turn out and find a dry twig; and if he can’t do it, go and borrow one. In fact, the Leather Stocking Series ought to have been called the Broken Twig Series. - Writing from the 19th century United States tends to be relatively complex, but grammatically so, rather than the sort of existentialist run-on nonsense with which we're latterly so often abused. Here, as a reasonably representative example, is the first paragraph of The Last of the Mohicans [1]:
> It was a feature peculiar to the colonial wars of North America, that the toils and dangers of the wilderness were to be encountered before the adverse hosts could meet. A wide and apparently an impervious boundary of forests severed the possessions of the hostile provinces of France and England. The hardy colonist, and the trained European who fought at his side, frequently expended months in struggling against the rapids of the streams, or in effecting the rugged passes of the mountains, in quest of an opportunity to exhibit their courage in a more martial conflict. But, emulating the patience and self-denial of the practiced native warriors, they learned to overcome every difficulty; and it would seem that, in time, there was no recess of the woods so dark, nor any secret place so lovely, that it might claim exemption from the inroads of those who had pledged their blood to satiate their vengeance, or to uphold the cold and selfish policy of the distant monarchs of Europe.
This was an extremely popular novel in its day, in the literal sense of "popular" - by no means was it read exclusively among the elite, and indeed the literary elite of the time tended to regard it despite occasional equivocation as generally of good quality - although Twain, with his usual inimitable style, quite rightly suggests [2] that Fenimore's work in general should have been considerably less well regarded than it was. Nonetheless, that it was so regarded, and so widely read, can hardly be brought into question.
[1] http://www.gutenberg.org/files/940/940-h/940-h.htm
[2] http://twain.lib.virginia.edu/projects/rissetto/offense.html
