James opens the book by expressing his anxiety about writing it—he is nervous, within the narrative, about sending letters to Mr. F. B., his friend in England, because F. B. is a Cambridge man: a well-educated member of the European intellectual elite, who is therefore capable of grand thinking and great writing. At his minister's advice, however, James begins to write only what he knows—the life of an American farmer—in the best way that he can write it. As a result, the prose in Letters from an American Farmer is relatively plain and straightforward, devoid of extravagant literary flourishes and elaborate devices that filled most 18th-century English novels. As James offers in the introduction, he hopes to give F. B. his life in "unaffected and candid detail."
With that being said, the letters address a sweeping array of subjects, and de Crèvecoeur's writing style changes to fit the occasion. When James expounds on the minutiae of farming, Crèvecoeur writes simply and straight to the point. When James waxes philosophical, however—on the nature of work, or on the bucolic ideals of the American settler—de Crèvecoeur uses the occasional literary device. Generally, where metaphors and similes do occur, they somehow link the topic at hand back to the agricultural world that James inhabits. Notably, there is a recurring figurative comparison between the industriousness of a colonial community and the industriousness of a hive of bees.
