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Title details for The Planter of Modern Life by Stephen Heyman - Available

The Planter of Modern Life

Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution

by Stephen Heyman
Robertson Dean
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
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. 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. 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.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    April 14, 2020

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781684577927
      • File size: 277181 KB
      • Duration: 09:37:27

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      December 9, 2019
      Louis Bromfield (1896–1956), an all-but-forgotten Lost Generation writer, gets a reassessment, more for his agricultural than his artistic legacy, from first-time author Heyman in this diverting, though at times superficial, biography. The book traces Bromfield’s unlikely career arc, showing how he parlayed his success as a bestselling and award-winning novelist who happened to have a knack for gardening into a full-throated agricultural innovator and reformer by the early 1940s, raising early alarms about the use of chemical pesticides and the environmental sustainability of farming practices. Heyman gives generous coverage to Bromfield’s reputation as a bon vivant, bolstered by his friendships with a diverse array of cultural heavyweights, from Edith Wharton, who exchanged gardening tips with him, to Humphrey Bogart, whose wedding to Lauren Bacall was held on Bromfield’s farm in Ohio. Finding much greater value in Bromfield’s agricultural writing than in his fiction (“Yes, it was overdone. Yes, it was overly romantic. It was, after all, a Louis Bromfield novel”), Heyman suggests that the former significantly influenced such modern environmental activists as Wendell Berry, but his discussion of Bromfield’s specific ideas are lacking. As a result, personality outweighs analysis in this portrait of Bromfield, but his colorful life makes for diverting reading.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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