"WHAT IS AN AMERICAN?": FIRST AMERICAN EDITION OF LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN FARMER, 1793

(CREVECOEUR, Michel-Guillaume Saint Jean De). Letters from an American Farmer, Describing Certain Provincial Situations, Manners, and Customs, and Conveying Some Idea of the State of the People of North America. Written to a friend in England by J. Hector St. John, a Farmer in Pennsylvania. Philadelphia: Mathew Carey, March 4, 1793. Small octavo, contemporary full brown tree sheep, original red morocco spine label. Housed in a custom clamshell box.

First American printing of this influential early work on American life and customs, with accounts of slavery, in contemporary sheep boards.

Crevecoeur's seminal Letters from an American Farmer was the first to ask and answer, in print, "What is an American?" Born in France, Crevecoeur "emigrated to Canada during the last of the French and Indian Wars. He served under Montcalm, and later seems to have explored near the Great Lakes and the Ohio River. He landed at New York in 1759, took out naturalization papers, traveled extensively in Pennsylvania and New York, and settled with his American wife. He spent idyllic years on his New York farm until the Revolution, when, as a Loyalist, he was forced to flee to New York [where he was imprisoned for three months as a spy] and then to France. During the quiet decade prior to the Revolution, he probably wrote most of the Letters from an American Farmer. In 1783 Crevecoeur returned to America" and eventually "settled in New York, where as French consul he attempted to cement the friendly relations of the two countries" (Hart, 174-75). Crevecoeur's famed volume, with its "series of twelve charming letters," first published in London in 1782, offers a candid account of his colonial experience that notably originates the notion of an American melting pot (Streeter 711). "Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world…" Crevecoeur contends that "the American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow with equal steps the progress of his labour; his labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest; can it want a stronger allurement?" Bound without rear free endpaper. Evans 25357. Howes C883. Sabin 17496. Contemporary owner signature. Early gift library bookplate with deaccession inkstamp.

Interior fresh with lightest foxing mainly to preliminaries, early repair to spine ends, mild rubbing to boards. A near-fine copy of a key Revolutionary-era work.