Lawrence treated his American subjects with a mixture of awe and critical suspicion. He characterized Benjamin Franklin as a staunch petty rationalist and Michel-Guillaume-Saint-Jean de Crèvecoeur as an emotional figure hiding behind the guise of false idealism and he viewed Edgar Allan Poe with condescension. Lawrence's positive assessment of the work of Herman Melville helped establish that author's reputation in the 1920s. He also examined the writings of James Fenimore Cooper Nathaniel Hawthorne Walt Whitman and Richard Henry Dana.