ANERICAN INDENTITY

American Identity

American Identity

Crevecoeur's Letters reflect the conundrum that faced the emergent American society. While the narrator of Letters proposes the American as a new being, when he actually describes Americans in other portions of the text, he distinguishes among them by using ethnic or religious labels. While the famous passage in Letter which he wrote in 1782 he imagines the European "melting" into an American, much of the rest of the text tells us about the process of transformation and shows us the unblended immigrant.

Crevecoeur is the first to directly approach the question of transformation from European to American. ...