Letters from an American Farmer

Writing as 'Farmer James', a settler in Pennsylvania, Crèvecœur describes life in the American colonies in twelve letters to an English friend: the farmer's work and his family, the whalers of Nantucket and Martha's Vineyard, the wildlife of the woods and the bees in his garden. He asks the famous question, 'What then is the American, this new man?', and answers that here people of all nations are melted into a new race. But he also describes the horror of slavery in Charleston, and in the last letter the farmer is torn apart by the Revolution.

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecœur (1735–1813), a French-born soldier and farmer who settled in New York, published the book in London in 1782, and it is one of the first works to define the American identity. Compare Franklin's Autobiography.