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How an Ohio farm boy turned literary celebrity inspired America's organic and sustainable food movement.Louis Bromfield first rose to fame in the 1920s as a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist with a green thumb. He built a beautiful garden outside Paris where he threw legendary parties that attracted flower breeders, movie stars, and expatriate writers like Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway (who smoldered with jealousy over Bromfield's literary success) . His novels were all bestsellers, but Bromfield's greatest passion was the soil.In 1938, he returned to his native Ohio to transform 600 badly eroded acres into a utopian cooperative farm called Malabar. From his rural seat, Bromfield launched a national crusade to improve America's relationship with the land.