Pleasant Valley [Paperback]

Louis Bromfield (Author), Gene Logsdon (Author), Kate Lord (Illustrator)

Editorial Reviews

Review

I read Pleasant Valley and The Farm more than forty years ago, and I am still grateful for the confirmation and encouragement I received from those books. At a time when farming, as a vocation and an art, was going out of favor, Louis Bromfield was a writer who genuinely and unabashedly loved it. He was not one of those bad pastoral writers whom love for farming is distant, sentimental, and condescending. Bromfield clearly had loved it familiarly and in detail. He loved the work and the people who did it well. --Wendell Berry

Pleasant Valley is one of those refreshing and delightful books that show up once in a lifetime. The connections between earth and humans are interwoven throughout as Louis Bromfield writes about farming with elegance and joy.
And Bromfield skillfully portrays that marriage between dream and reality that is so necessary in working the land as he writes, Wait until spring comes! This beautiful new edition of Pleasant Valley is as useful now, maybe even more so, than when it was first published in the early 1940s. Read it. It will enrich your life. --David Kline

Pleasant Valley is one of those refreshing and delightful books that show up once in a lifetime. The connections between earth and humans are interwoven throughout as Louis Bromfield writes about farming with elegance and joy.
And Bromfield skillfully portrays that marriage between dream and reality that is so necessary in working the land as he writes, Wait until spring comes! This beautiful new edition of Pleasant Valley is as useful now, maybe even more so, than when it was first published in the early 1940s. Read it. It will enrich your life. --David Kline

About the Author

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louis Bromfield, at his Malabar Farm home. After a fourteen-year stay in Senlis, France, Bromfield and his family returned to Ohio where the author discovered his deepest insights and where his literary career flourished.

Product Details

• Paperback: 336 pages
• Publisher: Wooster Book Co.; fourth edition (July 1, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1888683562
• ISBN-13: 978-1888683561
• Product Dimensions: 7.7 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #433,955 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

33 of 36 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Best farm book ever written., October 12, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Emmaus, PA (won't be in Moscow until next week)) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pleasant Valley (Paperback)

Novelist Louis Bromfield won the Pulitzer Prize for literature in 1927 (Early Autumn). He wrote a total of 31 books in his lifetime. But, for my money at least, Pleasant Valley is the best book he ever wrote. Malabar Farm comes a close second. Bromfield's other farm books include: The Farm, 1933 Out of The Earth, 1950 Animals and Other People, 1955 From My Experience, 1955

In 1962, his youngest daughter, Ellen, wrote The Heritage -- A Daughter's Memories of Louis Bromfield. She tells the story of growing up in the shadow of her famous father and his Hollywood pals -- Bogie and Bacall were married at Bromfield's Malabar Farm in 1945 -- wonderfully well. But even better, I think is her 1957 Strangers In The Valley, the story of how she and husband Carson moved to Brazil to start a Bromfield-style farm on the new frontier there.

Jim Breiner is right: Louie Bromfield was a genius and a brilliant writer. Living in France in the '20s, he helped Hemingway first get published, and was compared favorably with Fitzgerald, thurber and Steinbeck, among others. His fiction is now dated, but his farm writing is immortal.

22 of 23 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful book!, December 19, 1997

By A Customer

This review is from: Pleasant Valley (Paperback)

I grew up in Mansfield, Ohio and visited Malabar Farm on occassion. However, I never read any of Louis Bromfield's book until recently. After reading Pleasant Valley I was very touched by the stories of the people and animals Louis writes about in the book. I am reminded of the beauty of life we all experience no matter where we live if only we allow ourselves the opportunity to look around. Wonderful book.

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Pastoral and enriching., June 15, 2004

By 

Richard L. Pangburn (Bardstown, KY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Pleasant Valley (Paperback)

I bought this because it was one of several valuable books recommended by Gene Logsdon in his own book, THE CONTRARY FARMER. Logsdon said that the chapter entitled, "My Ninety Acres" was one of his favorite short stories. After reading it, all I can say is: me too, me too.

Romantic? Sure. But it gets to the core of what is really important in life.