SOURCE: “St. John de Crèvecoeur: a Case History in Literary Anglomania,” in French Review, Vol. 51, No. 4, March, 1978, pp. 565-76.

In the following essay, Aubéry examines the way in which Crèvecoeur sought to establish an idealized American identity even as his work appeared to justify the undercurrent of racism existing in America at the time.

Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crèvecœur, born in Caen on 31 January 1735, was a prolific writer. Under the pen-name of J. Hector St. John he published his Letters from an American Farmer,¹ which later became Lettres d'un cultivateur américain,² his own adaptation from his original English version. Far better known and appreciated in America than in Europe, this book is a classic of American literature of the colonial period. It is especially famous for the eloquent and somewhat pompous answer which it gives to the rhetorical question raised in the third letter...