The Farm

Rural Midland County Battles Urban Industrialism

The Farm is an honest book, a deeply felt book and a valuable record for this generation and those which are to come.”

-The New York Times Book Review

When industrious pioneer “the Colonel” MacDougal carved a working farm out of the still-wild landscape of the north-central Ohio frontier in the late 1700s, he sowed the seeds for several generations’ worth of the MacDougal family’s quintessentially American stories. The Farm is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield’s classic, sprawling novel about the fundamental friction between homesteading farmers, who lived and worked in symbiotic concert with the land and its natural rhythms, and the aggressive businessmen in the nearby town of Pentland. Filled with masterful characterizations and astute sociopolitical observations about the evolution of democracy and the gradual erosion of integrity and idealism in a changing world, it weaves actual historical events together with fictionalized elements of Bromfield’s own life. The Farm eloquently captures the simple joys and struggles of multiple generations living on a small family farm in rural America.

Bromfield, who would later go on to pen the bestselling nonfiction classics Pleasant Valley and Malabar Farm, both of which chronicle his personal experiences with farming in rural Ohio, was strongly motivated by both his passion for living in the country and his aversion to modern industrial society’s encroachment upon that lifestyle. This semi-autobiographical story, tackling multiple topical issues including the effects of immigration and industrialization as well as the nature of democracy, is an informative and compelling read for anyone who loves the land, history, or people of agrarian America.

This book is also available from Echo Point Books as a paperback (ISBN 1648372066).