SOURCE: “‘Strange Order of Things!’: The Journey to Chaos in Letters from an American Farmer,” in Early American Literature, Vol. 19, No. 3, Winter, 1984, pp. 249-67.

In the following essay, Winston analyzes Letters as a romance, suggesting that such an analysis helps explain the apparent contradiction between the early optimistic letters and the pessimistic letters that appear at the end of the work.

When Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur first published Letters from an American Farmer in England in 1782, an advertisement described the letters as “the genuine production of the American farmer whose name they bear. They were privately written to gratify the curiosity of a friend and are made public because they contain much authentic information little known on this side of the Atlantic: they cannot therefore fail of being highly interesting to the people of England at a time when everybody's attention is directed toward the affairs...