J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

An emigrant French aristocrat-turned-farmer, Jean de Crèvecoeur was granted New York citizenship in 1765 and became a landowner in Orange County. There, he wrote about his farming experiences and interpreted the nation's development in a series of charming and keenly observant essay-length letters about life in the Early Republic. A Baedeker of American culture for Old World readers, the book painted a vivid portrait of the young country, not only...

"A monumental, canon-defining anthology of four centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. Many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves--sometimes critically--to American values, but even in those that don't, one can detect a subtext about being American. The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable...