SOURCE: “Community and Utopia in Crèvecoeur's Sketches,” in American Literature, Vol. 62, No. 1, March, 1990, pp. 17-31.

In the following essay, Robinson examines Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America as a text that illuminates some of the contradictions often cited in Letters from an American Farmer.

I

By the end of the eighteenth century, Leo Marx tells us, the idea that “the American continent may be the site of a new golden age could be taken seriously in politics.”¹ Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer is perhaps the best articulation of this utopian impulse, embodying in its third letter an agrarian version of the American dream. There he presents a vision of a society of social and economic equals, made independent through their economic dependence on the land alone yet bound together in a supportive and compassionate community. The agrarian values that James embodies in the book's opening—familial rootedness...