CREVECOEUR, Michel Guillaume St. Jean de (1735-1813). Lettres d'un Cultivateur Americain. Paris: Cuchet, 1787.
3 volumes, 8vo (188 x 125 mm). Engraved title-pages, 4 engraved plates (including frontispiece, one folding). (Lacking engraved folding maps, some soiling or staining, some unidentified contemporary annotations or signatures, some wormholing to a few leaves.) Contemporary half calf gilt, vol. I: plain boards, edges sprinkled red, brown morocco lettering-piece gilt; vols. II and III: marbled boards (worn, some soiling, tiny wormhole to vol. I rear cover lower corner).
Second French Edition and considered the "best French edition" and "most complete of all editions" (Howes). The present edition is also "greatly enlarged, the whole of the third volume being added" (Sabin). First published in English in 1782, Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer was one of the first works to explain a version of a unified American identity through descriptions of American frontier life to Europeans life in rather than comparing the identifies of each colony. Howes C883; Sabin 17495.
Property from the Collection of Dorothy and Richard Fitch
This lot is located in Chicago.
