From My Experience: The Pleasures and Miseries of Life on a Farm

by Louis Bromfield

Overview

Bromfield’s continuing reflections about life and work at Malabar Farm

A sequel of sorts to his earlier book, Pleasant Valley, this book significantly adds to Louis Bromfield’s body of work on agriculture, economics, and the value of home.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781631015175
Publisher:	Kent State University Press
Publication date:	03/21/2023
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	995 KB

About the Author

Louis Bromfield (1896–1956), a Pulitzer Prize–winning author from Mansfield, Ohio, studied agriculture at Cornell University before transferring to Columbia University to study journalism. As a member of the American Field Service covering World War I in Senlis, France, he lived in Europe and Asia for 14 years and wrote often; however, it wasn’t until moving back to Ohio that Bromfield’s literary career began to thrive. In 1927, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his novel Early Autumn. In 1939, Bromfield purchased Malabar Farm, located near his hometown, which was his inspiration for writing Pleasant Valley, Malabar Farm, Out of the Earth, and From My Experience. The farm became an Ohio state park in 1976 and continues to promote sustainable agriculture and the importance of soil conversation.

Read an Excerpt

A sequel of sorts to his earlier book, Pleasant Valley, this book significantly adds to Louis Bromfield’s body of work on agriculture, economics, and the value of home.

Table of Contents

	A Fine Verbal Climate by Janet Flanner (Genet)	iii
	Apologia	1
I.	Fifteen Years After (By Way of Introduction)	3
II.	A Hymn to Hawgs	15
III.	It Can't Be Done	33
IV.	Gardens and Landscapes	72
V.	Malabar-do-Brasil	87
VI.	A Brazilian Farm Program	111
VII.	La Chasse aux Morilles	134
VIII.	A Somewhat Technical Chapter for All Who Love and Understand the Soil	146
IX.	More of the Same	166
X.	The Hard-Working Spring and the House Nobody Loved	199
XI.	How to Make a Paradise	220
XII.	Our Agricultural Economic Dilemma	235
XIII.	On Building Topsoils Ten Thousand Times Faster than Nature	250
XIV.	The Roadside Market to End All Roadside Markets	271
XV.	How to Live with Weather	283
XVI.	The White Room	294

Editorial Reviews

Reprint of the 1955 (Harper Bros.) edition with a new introduction by Janet Flanner. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Booknews

Because Bromfield has seen so many different lands, he is now more a country man than ever. When he turned his first spadeful on his new Ohio farm acres, it marked the return of the native. Bromfield writes his books in pencil, longhand. He has such concentration that he can come in from working in his fields, go to his desk and finish a sentence he started the day before.” —The New Yorker

“From My Experience . . . is full of stimulating ideas, fascinating for anyone who understands or wishes to understand something of land and people and animals and plants—their relations to economics, science and the vast scheme of life itself. But it . . . catches one’s attention in a different way and draws one back to read it, searchingly, again and again. For in it, cleanly and powerfully concentrated, is the story of a man’s search for the meaning of living.” —Ellen Bromfield Geld

From the Publisher