Conservation evangelist
New book rediscovers Louis Bromfield, a novelist and proto-environmentalist
At his country home outside Paris, Louis Bromfield traded gardening tips with fellow writers Gertrude Stein and Edith Wharton.
In the 1930s, celebrities, royalty and writers gossiped over food and drink on Sunday afternoons while admiring Bromfield’s enchanting flower gardens. By then, Bromfield was as famous as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald because his third novel, “Early Autumn,” had won the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.
In 1929, the author and his family moved to Senlis, a charming market town on France’s Nonette River. Fueled by wanderlust, he also toured India, dining at a maharaja’s palace, staying up late playing poker with an Indian princess and learning more about agriculture.
Then he came home, and his life took another turn. In 1939, he returned to his native Ohio, where he planted crops on Malabar Farm and advocated tirelessly for soil conservation, earning the title “America’s most famous farmer.”
Malabar Farm is now a state park, and Bromfield is the subject of a new biography, “The Planter of Modern Life: Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution.” At 6 p.m. Thursday, author Stephen Heyman will discuss the book in a free online conversation with Beth Kracklauer, food and drinks editor for The Wall Street Journal. To take part in the Pittsburgh Arts & Lectures program, register at pittsburghlectures.org.
Mr. Heyman was on assignment for The New York Times when he first heard Bromfield’s name on a visit to Western Pennsylvania.
“I was working on a travel story in the Laurel Highlands,” he said.
At Jamison Farm in Pleasant Unity, Westmoreland County, he talked with John and Sukey Jamison about sustainable sheep farming. When the couple mentioned Bromfield, Mr. Heyman began searching for more information about the writer and was struck by the contrasts in different parts of his life.
“The shape of the story appealed to me initially,” Mr. Heyman said. “These places and subjects don’t seem to fit together.”
Mr. Heyman, who moved to Pittsburgh in the fall of 2015, spent five years researching and writing and also received a fellowship from the Leon Levy Center for Biography at City University of New York. Filled with fascinating anecdotes, thoughtful analysis and graceful writing, the 286page book is a concise, compelling biography.
In Senlis, France, he met historical society members past the age of 90 who remembered Bromfield and his garden. He also traveled to Brazil to interview Bromfield’s youngest daughter, Ellen Bromfield Geld, who died a year ago.
Her father died alone and broke on Malabar Farm, convinced that his life had been a failure. But Mr. Heyman makes the case that Bromfield played an influential role in the “first wave of environmentalism that came out of the 1930s.”
“It’s a forgotten chapter but an instructive one. Bromfield as a proto-environmentalist was what gave me justification to look back at his life,” he said.
Malabar Farm State Park in Lucas, Ohio, is a 2½-hour drive from Pittsburgh. The 931-acre park is open from dawn to dusk for trail hiking, camping and picnicking. A barn with beef cattle, goats and horses is open daily. Wagon tours and house tours are currently not available. For more information, go to www.MalabarFarm.org