Louis Bromfield

Born: December 27, 1896
Died: March 18, 1956

Ohio connection: Birth

Mansfield

Louis Bromfield (birth name Lewis Brumfield), the son of Annette Maria Coulter Brumfield and Charles Brumfield, was a Pulitzer-Prize-winning novelist and a screenwriter, essayist, and conservationist. Bromfield, the author of thirty-three books of fiction and nonfiction may best be remembered for his early advocacy of land conservation and sustainable farming.  

After graduating from Mansfield High School in 1914, Bromfield attended Cornell University, enrolling in its College of Agricultural for one semester before returning to Ohio in 1915 to help his father run the family farm. In 1916 Bromfield attended Columbia University in New York to study journalism, however, in 1917, he enlists in the United States Army where he served in the U.S. Ambulance Corps. Bromfield was discharged from the U.S. Army in 1919 and later that year, he moved to New York to pursue a career in writing. On October 16, 1921, he married Mary Appleton Wood and they would go on to have three daughters. While in New York, Bromfield was employed as a reporter for the New York City News Service and, later, as the night editor with the Associated Press. While focused on his creative writing, Bromfield continued to pursue other opportunities, which led to work as a staff writer for Time magazine and a weekly column for The Bookman magazine titled “The New Yorker.” 

In 1924 Bromfield’s first novel is published. The Green Bay Tree was hailed by critics as an excellent first novel; the story is set in a small Ohio farm town that, like much of America in the 1920’s, is slowly changing to an industrial community. In 1925, Bromfield moves his family to France and begins to write full time. Possession is published in 1925, followed by Early Autumn, the 1927 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction, and A Good Woman, published in 1927. Other novels followed, including Twenty-Four Hours (1930), The Farm (1933), The Rains Came: A Novel of Modern India (1937),  and Until the Day Break (1942). Bromfield also wrote plays, short stories, and scripts for Hollywood movies while under contract with Samuel Goldwyn at MGM. His screenwriting credits include: Bringham Young, It All Came True, Johnny Come Lately, The Rains Came, and Mrs. Parkington.

In 1938 Bromfield decided to return to Ohio, where he bought one thousand acres of farmland in Richland County that he named Malabar Farm. The farm, where Bromfield’s famous friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were married in 1945, became widely known for its sustainable farming methods and the source of inspiration for Bromfield’s well-regarded nonfiction that includes Pleasant Valley (1945) and Malabar Farm (1948). Bromfield authored five other nonfiction works on sustainable agriculture and ecology. Selections from his books about his experiences at Malabar Farm were published in Louis Bromfield at Malabar: Writings on Farming and Country Life (1991).   

In 1976 Malabar Farm became a state park and is now Malabar Farm State Park, operated by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, it hosts thousands of visitors every year.

Louis Bromfield died at University Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, on March 18, 1956; he was 59 years old.

Books

Awards
1927 Pulitzer Prize, Fiction, for Early Autumn; 1929 O. Henry Award, Best American Short Story, for “The Scarlet Woman”;  Legion d’honneur (France), 1939; Audubon medal, 1952, for leadership in conservation farming, writing, and lecturing. Honors: honorary degrees from Marshall College, Parsons College, and Ohio Northern University.

Additional Resources

Malabar Farm Foundation

Recommended

Heyman, Stephen. 2020. The Planter of Modern Life : Louis Bromfield and the Seeds of a Food Revolution First ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.