Louis Bromfield was born on December 27, 1896, and died on March 18, 1956. He was an American writer and conservationist. In the 1920s, he was a popular novelist. Later, in the late 1930s, he changed his career to become a farmer and became one of the first people in the United States to support sustainable and organic agriculture. He won the Pulitzer Prize for the Novel in 1927 for his book Early Autumn. He created the experimental Malabar Farm near Mansfield, Ohio. He was an important part of the early environmental movement.

Early life and education

Lewis Brumfield was born in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1896. His father, Charles Brumfield, worked as a bank cashier and property investor. His mother, Annette Marie Coulter Brumfield, was the daughter of an Ohio farmer. Later in life, Brumfield changed his name to "Louis Bromfield" because he believed the new spelling appeared more distinguished.

As a young boy, Bromfield enjoyed helping on his grandfather's farm. In 1914, he began studying agriculture at Cornell University. However, his family's financial situation worsened, and he had to leave school after one semester. Because of the debt, his parents sold their home in Mansfield and moved to Bromfield's grandfather's farm, which was located on the edges of town.

Career

From 1915 to 1916, Bromfield tried hard to make the family farm productive again, but it was not successful. He later wrote about this difficult time in his book The Farm. In 1916, he went to Columbia University to study journalism. There, he joined a student group called Phi Delta Theta. His time at the university was short; he left after less than a year to volunteer in World War I with the American Field Service.

Bromfield worked in Section 577 of the U.S. Army Ambulance Corps and was assigned to help French soldiers. He fought in major battles, including the Ludendorff Offensive and the 100 Days Offensive. In 1918, he was briefly captured by German forces. Later, he claimed to have received the Croix de Guerre, but no records from French or American military sources support this.

Bromfield left the army in 1919. He found work in New York City as a journalist, critic, and publicity manager. In 1921, he married Mary Appleton Wood in a small ceremony near her family home in Ipswich, Massachusetts. They had three daughters: Ann Bromfield (1925–2001), Hope Bromfield (1927–2016), and Ellen Bromfield (1932–2019).

In 1924, Bromfield published his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, which featured a strong, independent female character. He wrote another book, Possession, in 1925. Critics like Stuart Sherman and John Farrar praised his early work.

In November 1925, Bromfield moved to Paris, where he became friends with important writers of the Lost Generation, including Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway. His third novel, Early Autumn, which described his wife’s background in Puritan New England, won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize. A New York Times writer called him “the best and most vital” young American novelist at that time.

Bromfield continued writing popular novels in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including A Good Woman, The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spraag, and The Farm, an autobiographical novel that romanticized his family’s past in farming. He also worked briefly as a screenwriter in Hollywood for Samuel Goldwyn.

In 1930, Bromfield moved into a restored 16th-century house called the Presbytère St-Etienne in Senlis, France. There, he created a beautiful garden along the River Nonette and hosted gatherings for artists, writers, and celebrities. Guests included Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Elsa Schiaparelli, and F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.

Bromfield became more interested in gardening during the 1930s. He learned advanced gardening techniques from local farmers and worked with Edith Wharton, who helped design gardens at her estate in Saint-Brice-Sous-Fôret. He also traveled to India twice. In Indore, he studied early organic farming methods at a soil institute. In Baroda City (now Vadodara), he visited Sayajirao Gaekwad III, the Maharajah of Baroda. His travels inspired his book The Rains Came (1937), which was made into a film. He used money from the book to create Malabar Farm, saying that “nothing could be more appropriate than giving the farm an Indian name because India made it possible.”

After the Spanish Civil War, Bromfield helped organize efforts to bring back American volunteers who had fought in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. He later received the French Legion of Honor for this work. He criticized British leader Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement in his 1939 book England, Dying Oligarchy. He left Europe after the Munich Agreement with an unclear plan to move to Ohio and raise his children on a farm.

In December 1938, Bromfield bought 600 acres of farmland near Lucas, Ohio. He built a large farmhouse called the Big House and used help from New Deal programs like the Soil Conservation Service and Civilian Conservation Corps to improve the land. He learned about soil conservation and promoted farming techniques such as green manures, contour plowing, and strip cropping.

In 1941, Bromfield became first vice president of the Friends of the Land, a group that worked to fix harmful farming practices that caused the Dust Bowl. The group included famous ecologists and farmers like Paul B. Sears and Aldo Leopold. Bromfield helped promote the work of agricultural reformers, including Edward Faulkner, whose book Plowman’s Folly criticized traditional farming tools. He also helped popularize the group’s magazine, The Land, which featured writers like E.B. White and Rachel Carson.

Bromfield made Malabar Farm famous in 1945 by hosting the wedding of his friend Humphrey Bogart to Lauren Bacall. He was the best man. Many celebrities visited the farm, including Kay Francis and James Cagney. E.B. White wrote a poem in 1948 about the lively atmosphere at Malabar.

Bromfield’s focus on agriculture and the environment grew as his writing career declined. Critics like Malcolm Cowley and Edmund Wilson said his later books were not as good. However, his books remained popular with readers. His 1947 novel Colorado sold over a million copies. He also wrote a series of books about farming and the environment, starting with Pleasant Valley (1945).

As his writing career slowed, Bromfield faced financial problems, partly because of the cost of running Malabar Farm and his expensive lifestyle. He tried to create smaller versions of Malabar in Wichita Falls, Texas, and Itatiba, Brazil, but these efforts failed. After his wife Mary died in 1952, he

Influence and legacy

After Louis Bromfield died, Malabar Farm became a state park and a place where people visit. Malabar Farm State Park has many visitors each year and keeps some of Bromfield's farming ideas. A special part of the park is called Doris Duke Woods, named after Doris Duke, who gave money to save the land from being developed after Bromfield's death.

Many of Bromfield's books about farming are still available to read. Farmers and environmentalists like Wendell Berry and Joel Salatin have said Bromfield was an important influence. In 1989, Louis Bromfield was honored in the Ohio Agricultural Hall of Fame after he died. In December 1996, the Ohio Department of Agriculture placed a statue of Bromfield in the lobby of its new building in Reynoldsburg, Ohio, which is named after him.

Bromfield's youngest daughter, Ellen Bromfield Geld, continued her father's work in Brazil. She and her husband, Carson Geld, moved there in 1952 and built a farm called Fazenda Pau d’Alho. Ellen became a well-known writer and newspaper columnist. She died in 2019.