Letters from an American Farmer and Other Essays Hardback

by J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur

Edited by Dennis D. Moore

Part of the The John Harvard Library series

Hardback

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Description

Letters from an American Farmer was published in London in 1782, just as the idea of an â€œAmericanâ€ was becoming a reality.

Those epistolary essays introduced the European public to Americaâ€™s landscape and customs and have since served as the iconic description of a then-new people.

Dennis D. Mooreâ€™s convenient, up-to-date readerâ€™s edition situates those twelve pieces from the 1782 Letters in the context of thirteen other essays representative of CrÃ¨vecoeurâ€™s writings in English. The â€œAmerican Farmerâ€ of the title is CrÃ¨vecoeurâ€™s fictional persona Farmer James, a bumpkin from rural Pennsylvania.

In his Introduction to this edition, Moore places this self-effacing pose in perspective and charts CrÃ¨vecoeurâ€™s enterprising approach to self-promotion, which involved repackaging and adapting his writings for French and English audiences. Born in Normandy, CrÃ¨vecoeur came to New York in the 1750s by way of England and then Canada, traveled throughout the colonies as a surveyor and trader, and was naturalized in 1765.

The pieces he included in the 1782 Letters map a shift from hopefulness to disillusionment: its opening selections offer America as a utopian haven from European restrictions on personal liberty and material advancement but give way to portrayals of a land plagued by the horrors of slavery, the threat of Indian raids, and revolutionary unrest.

This new edition opens up a broader perspective on this artful, ambitious writer and cosmopolitan thinker who coined Americaâ€™s most enduring metaphor: a place where â€œindividuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men.â€