With the publication of his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, in 1924, Louis Bromfield was regarded by his contemporary critics as one of the most promising new American writers of the post-war years, and the works immediately following, Possession (1925) and Early Autumn (1926), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize, were considered brilliant, as were A Good Woman (1927) and his own favorite of his earlier novels, The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg (1928).

With the publication of Twenty-Four Hours (1930), Bromfield fell into critical disfavor, a condition that continued until his death in 1956. Throughout those years, however, there was a prodigious output of novels, including The Farm (1933), plays, short stories, screenplays, and nature and agricultural works, and he enjoyed a remarkable popular success. Bromfield's later nonfiction includes the finest nature writing of his time and some of the finest in American literary history. Pleasant Valley (1945) is Bromfield's record of his...