Louis Bromfield Biography and List of Works

American popular novelist, essayist, and agrarian reformer, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his novel EARLY AUTUMN (1926), a portrait of an old New England family. Many of Bromfield's novels have rural setting and a strongly American atmosphere, although some of his stories are set in India. A central theme in Bromfield's work is the contrast between the city and the country - he veiwed his farm as a refuge from the chaotic world.

"The long journey across the burning, dusty plateau became suddenly a kind of nightmare, possessed only of the reality of dreams. It seemed now to belong to the remote past. Only the future existed. In her health and vitality, the aura of past experiences, however bad, never clung to her. The past had the power to depress you only if you were ill or tired. Hope, optimism, anticipation she knew, out of experience and instinct, were the rewards of health and vitality."
(from Night in Bombay, 1940)

Louis Bromfield was born in Mansfield, Ohio. He studied at Cornell Agricultural College and Columbia University. After the outbreak of World War I, Bromfield joined the United States army. He served in the American Ambulance Corps, and with the 34th and 168th divisions of the French Army in 1917-19, and was decorated for his services. Bromfield then returned to journalism in New York, writing critical reviews for several periodicals, among them the Bookman and Time magazine. He also worked as an assistant theatrical producer and as an advertising manager.

Between 1922 and 1925 Bromfield lived in Senlis, France. In 1932 he visited India, a journey that inspired his most famous book, THE RAINS CAME (1937). The story is set in Ranchipur and portrays the destinies of a large number of people as they encounter monsoon rains and the bursting of a dam. Bromfield's opinion of decadent Europeans is reveled in the character of Ransome, who is contrasted with awakening India, symbolized by the Maharajah.

In France in the '20s, Bromfield helped Ernest Hemingway first get published, and was compared favourably with Fitzgerald, Thurber and Steinbeck, among others. During these expatriate years Bromfield wrote his most highly acclaimed novels: THE GREEN BAY TREE (1924) is set in a small town in Ohio which is changing from a farming community to an industrial town, In A GOOD WOMAN (1927) a mother, who believes herself to be good and righteous, ruins her son's life.

In 1933 Bromfield moved back to the US, settling near Lucas, Ohio, where he had a farm. Bromfield's Malabar Farm was visited by such famous actors as Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall - they were married there in 1945. Bromfield received several awards and honours, among them LL.D. from Marshall College, Huntington, West Virginia, LL.D. from Parsons College, Fairfield, Iowa, D.Litt. from Ohio Northern University, and Chevalier, Légion d'honneur (1939). He was President of The Emergency Committee for the American Wounded in Spain in 1938 and the director of the United States Chamber of Commerce.

Bromfield died on March 18, 1956 in Columbus, Ohio. His later works include PLEASANT VALLEY (1945), a personal statement with an ecological theme, UNTIL THE DAY BREAK (1942), a spy story, set against occupied Paris in the 1940s, and WILD IS THE RIVER (1947), a romantic historical novel about the American Civil War, set against the background of the occupation of New Orleans by the Yankees.

The author's daughter Ellen has depicted, in The Heritage: A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield (1995), her life growing up in the shadow of her famous father. In Strangers in the Valley (1957), she reveals how she and her husband Carson moved to Brazilin, in order to start a Bromfield-style farm on the new frontier there.

For further reading: Yrs, Ever Affly: The Correspondence of Edith Wharton and Louis Bromfield, ed. by Daniel Bratton (1999); Louis Bromfield, Novelist and Agrarian Reformer by Ivan Scott (1998); The Heritage: A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield by Ellen Bromfield Geld (1995); Louis Bromfied and the Malabar Farm Experience by John T. Carter (1995); Louis Bromfield, ed. by David D. Anderson (1964).

Books by Louis Bromfield