CREVECCEUR, kreV'ker', JEAN il ECTOR SAINT dons DE (1731-1813). A French agriculturist, traveler, and author. lie was born at Caen, and was educated in England. He Caine to America in 1754, bought an estate near New York, and married the daughter of an American merchant. He suffered much from the Revolu tionary War, and in 1780 was imprisoned three months in New York on suspicion of being a spy. Ile was sent to England as a prisoner, was ex changed, reached France in 178•, and introduced there the culture of the American potato. On his return to New York (November, 1783) as French Consul, he found his wife dead, his house burned; his children, too, had disappeared, but were finally found in the care of a kindly merchant. He had previously published Letters of an kmerican Farmer (1782), which lie trans lated into French and published in Paris. They gave such glowing accounts of the climate and fertility of America that five hundred families are said to have left France for the Ohio Valley on the strength of his statements. Most of them soon died there. He wrote also a volume on Potato Culture (in French), and A Journey in Upper Pcnnsylrania and in NCIC Yorl Stale (2 vols.. in French, 1801). In his most important work, the Letters, Crevecceur, disguising his French nationality, writes as a simple-hearted American farmer of slight education and narrow horizon. Internal evidence in his writings tends
to indicate that he was a Quaker. He was a man of much cultivation. who refused to take any part in the fierce political and military con troversies of the Revolution. His idyllic descrip tions of life in the New World, with its ap proximation to Rousseau's state of nature, trans formed crudity into an idealistic mirage that fascinated the philosopher. Yet in some ways Crevecceur's ideals were such as typical Ameri cans have rarely been without—he saw in pro phetic vision the future glory of the country. lie had an exquisite sympathy with natural life that makes some of his descriptive passages prose idyls of great beauty; for example, the beauti ful passage describing him feeding quails in the snow. The Letters were translated into German and Dutch, and their idealized treatment of American rural life may perhaps be traced in Campbell, Southey, Coleridge. and Byron—pos sibly in Chateaubriand. After holding his consul ship for ten years, Creveeceur returned to France, dying at Sarcelles. Consult Tyler, Literary His to•y of the Revolution (New York, 1897).