Louis Bromfield and his Books

In good condition - has markings from use - has name inscribed inside - has yellowing inside dustjacket & on end of pages - due to differing weights in books, postage maybe adjusted at checkout.

Back in 1914, at the age of eighteen, Louis Bromfield took control of his grandfather's farm in Ohio after a short spell of study in scientific agriculture. Eighteen months later, he left the land for the more attractive world of journalism. Twenty-four years had passed when, as a world-famous novelist, he returned to Ohio to begin the life of a farmer where he had left off. To his considerable public Bromfield, at the time of his death in March, 1956, was as famous for his farm at Malabar as for his best-selling novels.

Between The Green Bay Tree of 1924, his first novel to be published, and The Rains Came of 1938, he devoted his entire energies to the writing of novels and short stories, but in the spring of 1939 he left his home in France for the three farms he had bought in Ohio and turned his mind to the problems of land reclamation, with such success that Malabar has become a model farm visited by some ten thousand people every year.

This critical evaluation of Louis Bromfield's literary work is an attempt to trace the influence of his background and his environment on his writing, to explain the paradox of his success in such divergent fields, to relate the practical farmer to the creator of numerous works of imagination. In telling the Bromfield story the author tells also the story of his books, how each came to be written, the germ which gave birth to the plot, the people who became characters, the experiences which were translated into themes, the travels which opened up new horizons. Many who have missed the early Bromfield novels will be drawn to read them now; those to whom they are old friends will delight in this account of the circumstances of their invention.