Louis Bromfield , novelist, short-story writer, columnist, and experimental farmer, was born on 27 December 1896 in Mansfield, Ohio, to a farming family that had settled Richland County in the early nineteenth century and had moved to town in the late nineteenth century as the result of agricultural reverses as Ohio became increasingly industrial. This transition was not only to color most of Bromfield's best fiction but it was to provide the impetus for his decision in 1938 to return to Richland County, after fourteen years' residence in France, to establish Malabar Farm, which he hoped would become fully self-sufficient. From this point onward Bromfield increasingly devoted his creative talents to nature and agricultural writing.

After education in the Mansfield public schools, a period as police reporter on the Mansfield News, and an unsuccessful attempt, together with his father, Charles Bromfield, and grandfather, Robert Coulter, to revitalize the family farm, Bromfield went...