Dictionary of Literary Biography on Louis (Brucker) Bromfield
Louis Bromfield was one of the many writers of his generation for whom residence in France provided a clearer understanding of his American subject matter. A native of Mansfield, Ohio, Bromfield and his family moved to his grandfather's farm during his last year of high school, and Bromfield contemplated a career as a farmer. He studied agriculture briefly at Cornell, but abandoned it to study journalism at Columbia in 1916. Later that year he went to France, where he served as an ambulance driver for nearly two years until the war ended in 1918. The French government later awarded him the Croix de Guerre for his service during the war. He returned to the United States late in 1919 and held a variety of writing jobs including that of drama and music critic for the Bookman.
The publication in 1924 of his first novel, The Green Bay Tree, brought him instant acclaim. It was quickly followed by Possession (1925), Early Autumn (1926), and A Good Woman (1927). Bromfield conceived of these four books as panels treating different phases of American life and suggested that they might be considered one novel under the general title of Escape. While not closely interrelated, they do have some characters in common and are tied thematically in their presentation of the struggles of individuals against the materialism of the new industrial order. They enjoyed moderate critical success and wide popular success: Early Autumn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for 1927.
Bromfield returned to France with his family for a vacation late in 1925. What was to have been a vacation, however, turned into a residence of thirteen years. The Bromfields became prominent expatriates, attending Natalie Barney's salon and visiting Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Bromfield defended the American expatriates in an essay, "Expatriate--Vintage 1927," published in Mirrors of the Year (1927), where he argued that the experience of living in Europe gave him a sharper perspective on his native land and that American culture was no longer in danger of being swallowed by European culture.
The Bromfields soon abandoned Paris itself, however, and took up residence in an old presbytere in Senlis, thirty-five miles to the north. Here Bromfield entertained lavishly, cultivated his interest in gardening, and found peace to maintain his prolific writing. His interest in gardening led to friendships with Edith Wharton, who lived nearby, and with Gertrude Stein, whom Bromfield praised as an "experimenter with words" in his review of The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933). He produced books at the rate of nearly one a year, but his critical reputation did not keep pace with his books' popular appeal. During the thirties, however, he produced his two best books. The Farm (1933) is a fictionalized account of his own family's history and depicts the gradual decline of their agrarian life and its replacement by an industrial one. The Rains Came (1937) deals with the struggle of India to enter the modern world without succumbing totally to the forces of materialism that had engulfed the West.
Bromfield's critical reputation has suffered from both the great quantity of his work and his large readership. In fact he did write easily, and the commercial demand for his work led him to publish much that was inferior. He was charged with writing fiction with the prospect of lucrative film sales in mind. But he also came under fire for his political philosophy, a Jeffersonian individualism which posited a natural aristocracy. Such a position was particularly unpopular in the collectivist-conscious decade of the thirties.
With the knowledge that war was imminent and that he could not remain in his comfortable home north of Paris, Bromfield returned to the United States late in 1938. The following year he bought three adjoining farms in Richland County, Ohio, near his native Mansfield, and threw himself actively into the scientific farming he had abandoned at the outset of his career. Malabar Farm became famous and provided source material for many of Bromfield's later books. Pleasant Valley (1945), Malabar Farm (1948), Out of the Earth (1950), and From My Experience (1955) record the development of Bromfield's agricultural experiments and offer advice on scientific farming. Farming now took precedence over fiction in Bromfield's life. He lectured widely on agriculture and conservation and published two books espousing his political views: A Few Brass Tacks (1946) and A New Pattern for a Tired World (1954).
At the end of his life Bromfield was nearly as well-known as a farmer as he was as a novelist. Nevertheless he retained a strong hold on the reading public so that even several of his Malabar Farm books were commercial successes. His Jeffersonian agrarianism was classically American, but it was also a philosophy rooted in eighteenth-century French influences. Bromfield's years of residence in Paris and Senlis did not have much direct influence on his fiction. Still, he was powerfully attracted to the French people and to the simple life still found in the French countryside. His French experiences could only reinforce the independent agrarian spirit which he inherited from his Midwestern ancestors and which he defended in some of his best fiction. It is this clear and forceful presentation of an agrarian point of view for which Louis Bromfield is best remembered.
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