Contributor

J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur

(1735 - 1813)

Born in Normandy in 1735, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur served in the French and Indian War and went around some of the British colonies as a trader and surveyor before marrying an American-born woman and becoming a New York farmer in 1769. Crèvecoeur went back to France in 1780, and his Letters from an American Farmer were published to wide acclaim in 1782. He returned a year later to his New York estate, Pine Hill, to find his house incinerated and his wife dead.

All Writing

Voices In Time

c. 1770 | Orange County, NY

Country for Old Men

Crèvecoeur says, “There is room for everybody in America.”More

Miscellany

“We are nothing but what we derive from the air we breathe, the climate we inhabit,” wrote J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur in his Letters from an American Farmer (1782). “Those who live near the sea, feed more on fish than on flesh, and often encounter that boisterous element. This renders them more bold and compromising.”