Les Natchez Reading Order

Les Natchez (written c.1799-1800, published 1826) by François-René de Chateaubriand is the vast prose epic from which the tales Atala (1801) and René (1802) were excerpted and published separately — a panoramic narrative of the Natchez Indians of Louisiana, their war against the French colonists in 1729, and the final destruction of their civilization. Les Natchez was conceived during Chateaubriand's American journey of 1791, when he spent several months in the wilderness of the Eastern United States, and it reflects both the direct observation of the American landscape and the Romantic mythologizing of the Native American that was common in European literature of the period (Chateaubriand's America is partly observed and partly invented). The work belongs to the tradition of the prose epic and the noble savage that runs from Rousseau through Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales to Longfellow's Hiawatha — but Chateaubriand's version is distinguished by the extraordinary quality of the landscape prose (the descriptions of the Mississippi, the Niagara Falls, and the American wilderness are among the great landscape passages in French) and by the melancholy of its fundamental subject: the destruction of a civilization by contact with a more powerful one.