Winner of the 2021 IACP Award for Literary or Historical Food Writing 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 story of a rich and successful playwright, playboy of society, facing in middle life the emptiness of his grasp on real life, the incompleteness of his own development. The background shifts from New York to France, with an abortive attempt to recapture a youthful dream; then back again, with perhaps a deeper understanding of his own reasons for failure." --Kirkus Reviews

This chilling true crime history reveals the story of a young woman in nineteenth century rural Ohio who poisoned her family for love. It was a cold and rainy day in Ohio’s Pleasant Valley in the spring of 1896, one that began like any other for the Rose family. What they didn’t know was 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 Ceely 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. In The Ceely Rose Murders at Malabar Farm, Ohio author and historian Mark Sebastian Jordan examines the story of the Poisoner of Pleasant Valley, and how it has resonated throughout the years.

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.

he Farm is a 1933 novel by Louis Bromfield. Written just before Bromfield's return from decades of living and writing in Europe, the novel reflects the agrarian interests that would dominate the author's thinking during the last two decades of his life.