3 Review(s)

The Deerslayer is the climactic novel in Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking series, the great epic of Euro-America’s genocidal conquest of the American continent. Set in the 1740s when upper New York state was the heartland of the powerful Iroquois confederacy, it relates the coming to manhood of Hawkeye, the noble white man who kills to perfection, his friendship with Chingachgook, the noble red savage, and thier bloody red struggles with scalp-hunting whites and the supposedly ignoble Iroquois on the shores of Lake Glimmerglass. In all literature, only Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick equals The Deerslayer in its evocation of natural beauty and murderous humanity. It stands as a powerful and disturbing testament to the violence which underlies the achievements of Western civilisation.