(First Separate Map of Nantucket) Letters from an American Farmer [with maps:] Map of the Island of Nantucket; Map of the Island of Martha's Vineyard with its Dependencies.

Crevecoeur

Published by Crevecoeur, 1782

About this Item

Crevecoeur / 1782 / (First Separate Map of Nantucket) Letters from an American Farmer [with maps:] Map of the Island of Nantucket; Map of the Island of Martha's Vineyard with its Dependencies. (Safe 2, 91513) Later antique-style half calf and marbled boards. Dark blue leather spine label, raised bands. Expert paper restoration to upper margin of title page. [14], 318 pages. 2 folding engraved maps and [2] pp. of advertisements. Without the half title. Occasional foxing to text leaves. Maps with slight offsetting. Overall a solid very good example. Earliest Separate Map of Nantucket First edition of this classic 18th-century account of America, with the earliest separate map of Nantucket. Michel Guillaume St. Jean de Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer, The map shows the island of Nantucket as well as the nearby island of Tuckernuck. The map names a number of places directly on the map. The town of Sherburne, which would be renamed after the island in 1795, is shown with several small houses and mills. Fulling Mill, which now names a road east of its original location, is also named. A sandbar off the island's southeastern tip is named Pochick. Letters from an American Farmer The epistolary text, Letters from an American Farmer, published by the French immigrant St. Jean de Crevecoeur, describe various eastern towns, including the lifestyle of farming on the island of Nantucket in the period immediately preceding the Revolutionary War, as well as politics, customs and its Quaker society. Written from the point of view of someone corresponding with an English gentleman, the book was only moderately popular in the US but proved a success in Europe, so much so that it is credited with spurring a wave of French migration. More recently scholars have hailed the book as one of the greatest early accounts of colonial American society transitioning to life as an independent nation. The chapter "What is an American" is a classic. [Crevecoeur's] famous farmer's Letters. are essentially essays of a philosophical character and as such reflect well the spirit of the eighteenth century. But they deal also with actual conditions and events as witnessed by Crevecoeur. Thus their value as a historical source is of a peculiar kind, and the mixture of the actual and the ideal in the author's mind must be appreciated by the historian - Clark. Clark including the book in his bibliography, Travels in the Old South, on the basis of one of the letters being written from South Carolina. The author wrote on the evils of slavery, specifically in the South. As literature unexcelled by any American work of the eighteenth century - Howes. Map Publication History The map was published in London in 1782, alongside a later edition of Crevecoeur's Letters of an American Farmer. The map was reissued later in a French 1785 edition entitled Lettres d'un Cultivateur Americain. The English first edition is significantly rarer than the French edition.

Seller Inventory # 91513

Bibliographic Details

• Title: (First Separate Map of Nantucket) Letters from an American Farmer [with maps:] Map of the Island of Nantucket; Map of the Island of Martha's Vineyard with its Dependencies.
• Publisher: Crevecoeur
• Publication Date: 1782
• Binding: Hardcover
• Condition: VG
• Book Type: Book
• Seller catalogs:
  • Antique Maps