A native of France, Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur lived half of his adult life in North America and in 1765 became a naturalized citizen of New York. He was a well-proportioned 5 feet 4 inches tall; had reddish-brown hair, tiny freckles, light-brown eyes, a face that was "a little long"; and made "a very handsome appearance." Although first published in Europe, his books are American in subject and setting. All of them are in the eighteenth-century epistolary tradition. His reputation rests on the first of these, Letters From an American Farmer (1782), a unified series of expository narratives and the earliest fiction in American literature to express how America differs culturally from Europe. Its chapter "What Is an American"" has been considered the classic statement of American identity. Crèvecoeur's narrative exposition of ideas in Letters From an American Farmer is so skillful that many literary historians and...