Building dirt: Louis Bromfield, a novelist with some novel ideas

Country property has always attracted a bit more than its fair share of philosophers, utopians, missionaries, dreamers, writers and nuts.

As farmers, many in this group fail, some despite their best efforts, other because of them. Jefferson and his plantation were essentially bankrupt when he died, though we now celebrate his experimentalism.

Writers who farm tend to be wealthier than farmers who write. It’s clearly easier to persuade the public that a dopey plot is worth reading than it is to persuade the dumbest househusband that a comparably rotten potato is worth eating.

Louis Bromfield is no longer a household name except maybe around his farm near Mansfield, Ohio, but he once was rich and famous.

Bromfield won a Pulitzer Prize for a novel in the 1920s, followed by a number of bestsellers. He wrote from the countryside of northern France. He was admired and connected. When war clouds gathered in the late 1930s, he chucked France and fiction to return to Pleasant Valley where he had been raised. Read more