CREVECOEUR (Michel-Guillaume-Jean de). Lettres d'un cultivat - Lot 21

CREVECOEUR (Michel-Guillaume-Jean de). Lettres d'un cultivateur américain [...] depuis l'année 1770 jusqu'en 1786. Paris: Cuchet, 1787. 3 volumes in-8, xxxii-478-(2) + 438-(6) + 592 pp, half-brown calf, smooth spines decorated with gilt fillets and fleurons with black title-pieces and tomaison; bindings rubbed with worn headpieces, one detached and preserved, some wetness, mostly marginal except for a few large and strong ones at the beginning of vol. III, ink stain on last page of vol. III (contemporary binding). PARTLY ORIGINAL EDITION, THE MOST COMPLETE. With dedication to the Marquis de La Fayette. Illustrated with 11 (of 12) hors texte copper-engraved plates: 3 engraved titles, 3 scenes, a fold-out technical plan, 4 (of 5) fold-out maps. Some rare copies, unlike this one, also include an additional portrait, not shown here. Joseph Sabin's bibliography (no. 17495) lists only 11 plates. THE AMERICANOPHILE'S BIBLE. These "letters" were first written and published in English (Letters of an American Farmer, London, 1782, one volume), then translated into French by the author himself (1784, 2 volumes, expanded edition in 1787, 3 volumes). Composed in the 1770s, they brought him lasting fame and made him one of the first writers from the United States: the young English Romantic school made much of him, seduced by his sensitivity to the charms of nature, and D. H. Lawrence even saw in him "the emotional prototype of the American". ONE OF THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, CREVECOEUR (1735 - 1813) was born in Caen into a family of minor nobility. He served in Canada from 1755 to 1759 as a cartographer in the French armies engaged against the English in the Seven Years' War, then worked in various trades before settling in 1760 as a farmer in Orange County, New York: he was naturalized as a British citizen in 1765 under the name J. Hector Saint-John de Crèvecoeur, and accepted into the Oneida tribe in 1766. In the midst of the Revolutionary War, he wanted to travel to France, but was held prisoner by the British on suspicion of espionage, and only reached his destination in 1782 after passing through Dublin and London. When he returned to New York in 1783, in the newly proclaimed Republic, it was as French consul, a post he held first, with one interruption, until 1790. He then spent most of the rest of his life in France, teaching at the Jardin des Plantes and the Collège de France (he knew Cuvier and had met Buffon). Crèvecoeur published several other works, including an important Voyage dans la haute Pennsylvanie et dans l'État de New York (1801). Provenance: Cornelis de Witt (ex-libris stamp on titles).