Stephen Heyman

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 (eBook, ePUB)

• Format: ePub

Produktbeschreibung

Winner of the 2021 IACP Award for Literary or Historical Food Writing
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.

Louis Bromfield was a World War I ambulance driver, a Paris expat, and a Pulitzer Prizewinning 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. Gertrude Stein enjoyed his food, Edith Wharton admired his roses, Ernest Hemingway boiled with jealousy over his critical acclaim. 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 like Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall (who were married there in 1945).

This sweeping biography unearths a lost icon of American culture, a fascinating, hilarious and unclassifiable character whobetween writing and plowingalso dabbled in global politics and high society. Through it all, he fought for an agriculture that would enrich the soil and protect the planet. While Bromfield's name has faded into obscurity, his mission seems more critical today than ever before.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: W. W. Norton & Company
• Seitenzahl: 352
• Erscheinungstermin: 14. April 2020
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781324001904
• Artikelnr.: 59592768

Autorenporträt

Stephen Heyman has written for the New York Times, Slate, Vogue, and many other publications. He is the recipient of fellowships from the Leon Levy Center for Biography and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He lives in Pittsburgh.