Hector St John de Crevecoeur, The Divided Loyalist: Crevecoeur's America, Selected from His Letters and Sketches [Excerpts from Letters from an American Farmer and Sketches of Eighteenth-Century America]

235 pp. Red cloth spine, gilt titles and rules, marbled paper over boards. Introduction by Marcus Cunliffe, illustrations by Sarah Van Niekerk. In addition to the full-page frontispiece, the illustrations consist of 17 head-pieces, one at the opening of each letter or sketch. The text is selected from Letters from an American farmer (first published in 1782) and from some of Crevecoeur's surviving manuscripts, which were published in 1925 as Sketches of eighteenth-century America. The author "wrote these 'Letters' during a period of seven years prior to the American Revolutionary War, while farming land near Orange County, New York. They are told from the viewpoint of a fictional narrator in correspondence with an English gentleman, and each letter concerns a different aspect of life or location in the British colonies of America. The letters are written in a spirit of touching simplicity, almost better than Chateaubriand. You'd think neither of them would ever know how many beans make five. This American Farmer tells of the joys of creating a home in the wilderness, and of cultivating the virgin soil."