ish emigre poet Czeslaw Milosz recently observed that the popular myth of America, like all such myths, "is kept alive by what it chooses not to say; it selects only the attractive elements from a complex reality." The same could be said of the work of
J. Hector St. John de Crevecoeur (1735-1813). His Letters from an American Farmer created a minor sensation when it first ap- peared in Europe, and passages from this book are still cited in our college texts. His panegyrics to the New...