The Planter of Modern Life
How an Ohio Farm Boy Conquered Literary Paris, Fed the Lost Generation, and Sowed the Seeds of the Organic Food Movement
Winner of the 2021 IACP Award for Literary or Historical Food Writing 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…
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.