Louis Bromfield:125th Anniversary: Where Can I Read More?

This book will take you from the birth year of Louis Bromfield, until his dying day in March of 1956. "Louis Bromfield and his Malabar Farm" touches on every aspect from Mr. Bromfield's life as a World War One soldier to his days of entertaining world class guests to changing the agriculture field as we know it today. In this book you will learn what life was like at Malabar, the people who lived there, and how Louis, farm managers, and farm hands revived over 900 acres of land. Explore the halls of the "Big House" and the hills of Malabar Farm as author, Joe James, takes you around the most intriguing, interesting, and historically rich places on the farm. Learn about the several families who lived on the property such as the Rose family and why Celia killed her family, the Pugh family, and their cabin, and most importantly, the Bromfield family, Louis, Mary, Anne, Hope, and Ellen and what each of them did while living at Malabar Farm and beyond.

A Finalist for the 2021 International Association of Culinary Professionals (IACP) Award for Literary or Historical Food Writing and Longlisted for the 2021 Plutarch Award How a leading writer of the Lost Generation became America's most famous farmer and inspired the organic food movement. Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Hemingway or Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. The ideas he planted at his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, would inspire America's first generation of organic farmers and popularize the tenets of environmentalism years before Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. A lanky Midwestern farm boy dressed up like a Left Bank bohemian, Bromfield stood out in literary Paris for his lavish hospitality and his green thumb. He built a magnificent garden outside the city where he entertained aristocrats, movie stars, flower breeders, and writers of all stripes. Gertrude Stein enjoyed his food, Edith Wharton admired his roses, Ernest Hemingway boiled with jealousy over his critical acclaim. Millions savored his novels, which were turned into Broadway plays and Hollywood blockbusters, yet Bromfield's greatest passion was the soil. In 1938, Bromfield returned to Ohio to transform 600 badly eroded acres into a thriving cooperative farm, which became a mecca for agricultural pioneers and a country retreat for celebrities like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (who were married there in 1945). This sweeping biography unearths a lost icon of American culture, a fascinating, hilarious and unclassifiable character who--between writing and plowing--also dabbled in global politics and high society. Through it all, he fought for an agriculture that would enrich the soil and protect the planet. While Bromfield's name has faded into obscurity, his mission seems more critical today than ever before.

The people of mid-Ohio's Pleasant Valley went on with their normal lives that cold and rainy spring of 1896, not knowing that young Ceely Rose was brooding. She'd been told to forget her obsession with handsome Guy Berry. She'd been told about the danger of Rough-on-Rats poison. She'd heard about murdering those who stand in the way of love. By the time she was done, her family would be dead and others threatened. Later, the place where these crimes took place became Malabar Farm, the estate of Pulitzer Prize-winning author and conservationist Louis Bromfield. Historian, playwright and storyteller Mark Sebastian Jordan examines the story of the Poisoner of Pleasant Valley, Ceely Rose, and how it has resonated throughout the years.

Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming. This lively, outspoken, and affectionate memoir preserves all things Louis Bromfield fought for or against in a life marked by surging vitality and gusto. He came from an Ohio family whose roots were in the land before the land was lost. He had his father's love of the land, and from his willful mother a hunger to know the world. From the New York City of theaters, concerts, parties, and novels, and a life in France that his success allowed, he finally returned to Ohio and established a new order for his family and friends, and for his followers, a new orbit into which they were drawn. Ellen Bromfield Geld wrote a memoir of the man who was Louis Bromfield, father and friend, tyrant and "Boss," alive always to whatever was worth responding to in people and in places, yet complex and lonely as a writer must essentially be to work at his craft. Now revived in paperback thirty-five years after its first publication, The Heritage remains a moving tribute and the recreation of a remarkable human being.

How Malabar Farm pioneered soil conservation and grew the sustainable agriculture movement Established in 1939 by Pulitzer Prize-winning author and farmer Louis Bromfield, Malabar Farm was once considered "the most famous farm in the world." Farmers, conservationists, politicians, businessmen, and even a few Hollywood celebrities--including Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, who married there--flocked to rural Ohio to see how Bromfield restored worn-out land to lush productivity using conservation practices. Permanent, sustainable agriculture, Bromfield preached, was the "New Agriculture" that would transform the postwar world. Anneliese Abbott tells the story of Malabar Farm within the context of the wider histories of soil conservation and other environmental movements,especially the Ohio-based organization Friends of the Land. As one of the few surviving landmarks of this movement, which became an Ohio state park in 1976, Malabar Farm provides an intriguing case study of how soil conservation began, how it was marginalized during the 1950s, and how it now continues to influence the modern idea of sustainable agriculture. To see Malabar strictly as a modern production farm--or a nature preserve, or the home of a famous novelist--oversimplifies the complexity of what Bromfield actually did. Malabar wasn't a conventional farm or an organic farm; it was both. It represents a middle ground that is often lacking in modern discussions about sustainability or environmental issues, yet it remains critically important. Today, as Malabar Farm State Park remains a working farm with a new interpretive center that opened in 2006, its importance and impact continue for current and future generations.

#Originally published: New York : Harper Brothers, 1945.

Hindus and Moslems, Brahmins and Untouchables, western missionaries and British colonial bureaucrats, the famous novelist brings to life the social conditions of the last decade of the British Raj. Basis of a 1939 movie featuring Myrna Loy and Tyrone Power.