During the 1920s, novelist Louis Bromfield was a success at everything he touched: Gertrude Stein enjoyed his food, Edith Wharton admired his roses, Ernest Hemingway boiled with jealousy over his critical acclaim. Yet as Stephen Heyman reveals in this "delightful and exhilarating page-turner" (Booklist), Bromfield's greatest passion was the soil, and in 1938 he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio. At his utopian experimental farm, Malabar, Bromfield would inspire America's first organic farmers, and as recounted here, he can now be understood as a pioneer of environmentalism.