Jean de Crevecoeur: New World

J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, born in 1738, served in the French and Indian war in1755. After the defeat of the French Army, he moved to New York State where he picked up farming and married an American girl, Mehitable Tippet, in 1700. He wrote the story, Letters from an American Farmer, in 1792, which had helpful information and the understanding on the “New World” that helped create an indent of America to the European minds. His story described the whole country instead of some regional colony. Crevecoeur was the first person to explore the “American Dream”. He returned to France in 1779 for a few years and came back to New York State as a French Consul, where he was elected to the American Philosophical Society. He left America in 1790 back to France; he died on November 12, 1813 with a heart ailment. The cause of death was discovered when he was arrested as an American spy.
James E. Bishop believes that reading Letters from an American Farmer preserves tension between dark and cynical, and from this, it may be seen not only a manifesto of early American nationalism but Crevecoeur’s feeling about the burgeoning American nation. Bishop also states that this interrelationship is important not only for Crevecoeur, but for the American Landscape itself (361). Crevecoeur describes American as hard working and they are all equal. He also describes the “New Land” in great details unlike other authors of this time, when they only talked about their experience with Native Americans and religion, not much about the land they lived on.
Bishop states how the Letters from an American Farmer, written in 1774 just two years before the Declaration of Independence, has a significant relationship between Crevecoeur’s vision of masculinity and Thomas Jefferson’s. Crevecoeur’s work was between the time when Thomas Jefferson’s national identity was embryonic stage up to the end of the period of submission to authority was not considered antithetical to manliness (362).

Work cited:

Bishop, James E. "A Feeling Farmer." Early American Literature 43.2 (June 2008): 361-377. Academic Search Premier. EBSCO. 4 Sep. 2009 .

Jean de Crevecoeur Biography, Bigoraphybase, http://www.biographybase.com/biography/de_Crevecoeur_Jean.html, (accessed 09,05,2009)