Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur is best known for his letters, essays and pamphlets that he wrote about America. These literary works were shipped to and published overseas. They are also the main reason that Mr. Crevecoeur is credited for bringing in more immigrants to America than any other single person in American History. He is also the person who created and defined the phrase, "The American Dream." Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur's use of compare and contrast along with parallelism, are his greatest literary contributions in the emerging American literary times during the colonial period.
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Throughout Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur's Letter III, What is an American, he uses a lot of compare and contrast, which is conveyed through parallelism. This was a very effective way in showing the people in Europe how much better he thought America was. Mr. Crevecoeur uses the term here/we to represent America and there/they to represent Europe. He does this as a way to describe America in a positive manner, such as, "Here are no aristocratical families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one, no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury." This quote simply means that in America, at that time, you did not have to answer to a person of royalty or to a person of the church. As Americans, you did not have someone dictating your every move. Another quote that states that same statement is, "We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. Here man is free as he ought to be; nor is this pleasing equality so transitory as many others are.".
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Michel-Guillaume-Jean de Crevecoeur also uses symbolism to describe man. He refers to Americans as plants, like in the sentence "Men are like plants; the goodness and flavor of the fruit proceeds form the peculiar soil and exposition in which they grow.
