vii, 412 pp. Brown cloth, black titles and borders, illustrated endpapers. Engraved frontispiece. Celebrated for almost 150 years as the prototype of the American adventure story, The Last of the Mohicans remains a perennial favorite, an astonishingly complex work to be read on many levels. Irradiated by an elusive irony that gives epic scope to the American colonial experience, it projects on a broad canvas the futile efforts of European armies to wrest a glorious wilderness from the Indians and each other. It speaks with compassion of racial injustice and prejudice, especially of the dispossession of the Indian.
