By CHARLES McGRATH


Alexis de Tocqueville, the author of the landmark “Democracy in America,” was in many ways a typical Frenchman. Practically the minute he got off the boat, in Newport, Rhode Island, on May 9, 1831, he started making generalizations: the only thing Americans really care about is making money. American women are good homemakers but boring wives. Americans drink no wine but stuff themselves with stupefying amounts of food.

But Tocqueville was also unusual, especially for a Frenchman of his class, in immediately warming to America, a country that most European travelers considered uncouth, and Americans in turn warmed to him. His letters home fairly bubble with enthusiasm.

“Here we are truly in another world,” he wrote to his brother Edouard, and in a letter to his father he said, “This population is one of the happiest in the world.”

Most of Tocqueville’s letters from America, which were written between the spring of 1831 and February 1832, have never been published in English, but Frederick Brown, a biographer of Flaubert and Zola, has collected them for a volume that Yale University Press is to release next year. A sample of the letters reveals a Tocqueville different from the one we think we know.

He’s much younger-seeming. Tocqueville was 30 when he published “Democracy in America” but only 25 when he made his ninemonth trip, and his letters have a boyish ebullience. He writes about dancing on the deck of the ship that carried him to America, and crawling out on the bowsprit to watch the foam break.

Tocqueville and his friend and traveling companion, Gustave de Beaumont, were here to study the American prison system for the French government.

But almost from the start of his trip Tocqueville seems to have imagined another kind of book, a study of Americans themselves.

The letters are in a way field notes for “Democracy in America.” In them, Tocqueville likes pretty much everything he sees except for slavery and the forced resettlement of the Indians. The most moving passage in the sample is a long description of some Choctaws boarding a riverboat in Memphis.

“The whole spectacle had an air of ruin and destruction,” he writes. “It spoke of final farewells and of no turning back.” Most of the letters, Mr. Brown said, have a tautness and an elegance that derive from Tocqueville’s education in 18th-century prose.

Once he got to America, Tocqueville was dazzled by the country’s sheer expansiveness, Mr. Brown said, and found in all that physical space a sense of inner space and freedom.

“But what’s remarkable,” he went on, “is how open he was to everything. He wasn’t snobbish at all. All right, so Americans spit - it just didn’t bother him very much.”

Alexis de Tocqueville