Letters from an American Farmer

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."