Books, Arts & Manners: Terra Incognita

Imagining America By Peter Conrad

Oxford, 352 pp., $12.95 “Primitive liberty, I have regained thee at last,” exulted Chateaubriand at the sight of the boundless American wilderness. Wrapped in a bearskin purchased from the Indians, his head covered by a red flannel cap and beard grown long, the French nobleman saw in the wilds of the Ohio valley the embodiment of Rousseau’s dream of man living uncorrupted by European civilization.