ABSTRACT
Writing in the Mercure de France, Pierre-Louis Lacretelle claimed that Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur was a natural poet who made up in fidelity to local detail whatever he lacked in training as a descriptive writer. Crèvecoeur was an American farmer, for a while, but he had been born in Caen in 1735, the son of a Norman petty nobleman. Educated by the Jesuits, he lived a year in England, served in the Canadian colonial militia as a surveyor and cartographer, was wounded when the English captured Quebec, then cashiered from the French forces in circumstances he kept hidden for the rest of his life. Crèvecoeur’s life, marked by shifts and flights from one role to another, therefore spanned three careers and, in a sense, three nationalities. He spent barely one tenth of his life as an American farmer.
