Michel-Guillaume Jean de Crevecouer, long regarded as a chief figure in American letters of the Revolutionary period, is remembered as the author of Letters from an American Farmer and the posthumous Sketches of Eighteenth Century of America, but his last and most ambitious work has been almost entirely neglected. Published in France as Le Voyage dans la haute Pensylvanie et dans d'etat de New York, Crevecouer's last book was never popular and has not heretofore appeared in English. Yet the Voyage has much to add to Crevecouer's picture of eighteenth-century America, and to our own...

Although much has been written about how the novel relates to the epic, the drama, or autobiography, no one has clearly analyzed the complex connections between prose fiction as it evolved before 1800 and the literature of travel, which by that date had a long and colorful history.

Percy Adams skilfully portrays the emergence of the novel in the fiction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and traces in rich detail the history of travel literature from its beginnings to the time of James Cook, contemporary of Richardson and Fielding. And since the recit de voyage and the novel...