Word: bromfield
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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PLEASANT VALLEY-Louis Bromfield-Harpers...
After nearly 15 years' absence from the U.S., mostly in France, Novelist Louis Bromfield returned in 1938 to his native Ohio valley near Mansfield, bought three rundown farms, built a big house, and organized a cooperative farming community. Pleasant Valley is his story of the venture. Its 301 readable pages are crammed with anecdotes and opinions, experiences in house building and land reclamation, bits of autobiography and local history, and a few modest essays, modeled on Thoreau, on wild life, farm life, and the healing power of the land...
...Author Bromfield's resources and tastes are exceptional, his farm problem was common as dirt. In fact, it was dirt. The three farms he bought were typical of millions of acres of once-rich U.S. land. They had been farmed recklessly, then rented to tenant farmers who put nothing, back into the land, and finally, as the top soil washed away, abandoned. Bromfield's grandfather had raised eight children on a 100-acre valley farm, and bought little more than spices, tea, salt and coffee. Bromfield's 640 acres, when he bought them, would not support...
Adopting tested reclamation measures, Bromfield put five families besides his own on his land. His model was the Russian collective farm, with himself as capitalist substituting for the state. To each family he supplied all food except "coffee, spices and sugar," and a salary "above the average." He agreed to put up whatever money was needed until the farms showed a profit. Then he was to receive the first 5%, with all profits above that divided according to each tenant's salary...
...Parkington (M.G.M.) is the fourth lesson in the Garson-Pidgeon series on true love and enduring marriage (Blossoms in the Dust, Mrs. Miniver, Madame Curie). It discharges an obligation to the Louis Bromfield original by drawing a fine distinction between the robber barons of the '90s, who robbed each other, and the Wall Street wolves of the '30s, who robbed widows and orphans. Another distinction that may strike audiences as more valid is that the barons (most of them) ended up in mansions on Fifth Avenue and the wolves (some of them) in Sing Sing cells...