cover image St. John de Crevecoeur: 2the Life of an American Farmer

St. John de Crevecoeur: 2the Life of an American Farmer

Gay Wilson Allen, Roger Asselineau. Viking Books, $19.95 (266pp) ISBN 978-0-670-81345-2

French-born, well-bred and educated Crevecoeur, author of Letters of an American Farmera fictional and idealized account of 18th century American life as viewed from his Orange County, N.Y., farmis the subject of a lively biography by New York University professor Allen (Waldo Emerson, etc.) and Asselineau, who teaches at the Sorbonne. In his adventurous life, beset by divided national loyalties, Crevecoeur served in the French Colonial Army in Canada before settling on his New York farm, which he eventually was forced to abandon because of his Loyalist sympathies. Imprisoned by the British in New York on false charges of spying, he escaped to England where he published his Letters. When he returned to Paris, he was lionized by the literati and appointed the first French consul to New York where he became a friend of the new nation's leaders. He and his children survived both the revolutionary and Napoleonic eras in France where he retired. (September 15)