Crèvecoeur's Voyage: Writing the Early American Backcountry into Words

This study presents a neglected yet crucial work on the United States after independence: Voyage dans la Haute Pensylvanie et dans l’état de New-York (1801), the last book by Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, author of Letters from an American Farmer (1782). Written after Crèvecoeur's return to France, Voyage is an ambitious survey of America for a European audience, covering everything from biographies, geopolitics, sociology, to natural history, Indigenous folklore and more. Voyage is an early American encyclopedic narrative imagining as much as describing the United States from across the Atlantic. Genre-hybrid, the text mixes fiction, non-fiction, memoir, political and philosophical discourse and travelogue to explain what the new nation is becoming. While Letters focuses on settled Pennsylvania, Voyage moves through the Backcountry, a strip of land stretching from the western edges of the original states to the Appalachians-a region which proves central to the production of an American-made identity. Using close reading and reception studies this paper examines how Crèvecoeur represents America’s institutional and political development after Independence. It traces Voyage’s publication, its reviews, the subsequent translations and circulation in Europe, placing it in existing discourses about revolution, republicanism, and post-1776 transformations. In conclusion, Voyage deserves serious reappraisal not only as Crèvecoeur’s literary culmination, but as a foundational text in the way it provides one of the best descriptions of the Backcountry, the geopolitical space in which the development of American identity came into its own, distinguishing itself from the remnants of British and European influences.