SOURCE: “The Nantucket Sequence in Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer,” in New England Quarterly, Vol. 64, No. 3, September, 1991, pp. 414-32.

In the following essay, Philbrick claims that the usual assessment of Letters as an epistolary novel may prove useful in explaining the beginning and ending of the text, but such a reading ignores the middle sequence of letters dealing with Nantucket Island.

In the last twenty years, critics have tended to approach J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782) as an embryonic epistolary novel. When read in this way, what had earlier been considered a travelogue of isolated set-pieces has been shown to have a “rudimentary plot” that traces the banishment of the Letters' fictional narrator, James the Farmer, from the pre-Revolutionary Eden of his farm in Pennsylvania. While this approach has provided a convincing means of reconciling the utopian fantasy...