Letters from an American Farmer is a book by the French writer J Hector St John de Crèvecoeur, first published in 1782. De Crèvecoeur travelled extensively in New York and Pennsylvania after resigning his commission following an injury during the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759. He became a British citizen at New York in 1765 and bought a farm in Orange County.

Over the next seven years, de Crèvecoeur began working on his book. Written as imaginary correspondence between ‘James’, an American farmer and ‘Mr F B’, an English gentleman, the work explores the origins of a distinct American identity over twelve letters. It looked at the differences between European and American society (Letters II-III); the lives of Quakers at Nantucket (Letters IV-VIII); the moral issues surrounding enslavement (Letter IX); natural history (Letter X); agricultural practices (Letter XI) and the political turmoil in the years before the outbreak of the Revolutionary War (Letter XII).

The book only sold moderately well in North America but found a ready audience in Europe and de Crèvecoeur published an extended French edition in 1784. In Britain, the work found an audience increasingly interested in America due to the ongoing conflict and it came to influence the writings of Romantic poets who admired de Crevecoeur’s evocative description of the natural landscape.