| This edition represents the third volume of essays written in English by Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813), the French-born author of Letters from an American Farmer (London, 1782) and Sketches of Eighteenth Century America, edited by Henri Bourdin, Ralph H. Gabriel, and Stanley T. Williams (New Haven, 1925). Based directly on the author's holograph manuscripts, which the Library of Congress purchased in 1986, this edition brings together the following nine pieces: five previously unpublished essays: "An Happy Family Disunited by the Spirit of Civil War," "Rock of Lisbon," "Sketches of Jamaica and Bermuda," "The Commissioners," and "Ingratitude Rewarded"; and corrected texts of these four previously uncollected essays, each edited by Bourdin and Williams: "Susquehanna," consisting of two "halves" published separately, one in the Yale Review in 1925 ("Crevecoeur on the Susquehanna, 1774-1776") and one in Sketches ("The Wyoming Massacre"); "A Sketch of the Contrast Between the English and the Spanish Colonies," originally published in the University of California Chronicle in 1926; "Hospitals," published as "Hospitals (During the Revolution): An Unpublished Essay" in Philological Quarterly in 1926; and "The Grotto," published in the Nation, in 1925, as "Crevecoeur the Loyalist: The Grotto: An Unpublished Letter from the American Farmer.".;This edition standardizes and modernizes Crevecoeur's often inconsistent spelling and grammar. The Introduction includes a list of words whose spelling this edition silently corrects; otherwise, there is a textual note for each emendation. This edition also includes an appendix that presents the twenty-four passages the author omitted in revising his draft of "An Happy Family Disunited by the Spirit of Civil War." That essay, the first selection in this edition, provides a rare opportunity to see Crevecoeur at work revising--rethinking, reseeing--his own writing. |
