The Heritage

A Daughter’s Memories of Louis Bromfield

First published in 1962, in this lively, outspoken and affectionate memoir are all the things Louis Bromfield loved and hated, fought for or against, in a life marked by surging vitality and gusto. He came of an Ohio family whose roots once were in the land, before the land was lost. He knew early that the life of a small town was not for him. He had from his father a love of the land, and from his wilful mother a hunger to know the world. So he went off to taste of the world, first briefly in college, then in France during the First World War. When it ended and he returned to New York, he was quickly immersed in a life compounded—simultaneously—of several jobs, theaters, concerts, parties, courtship and marriage, good living and the writing of novels that brought quick success.

It was a rapid and fantastic success in many ways, and he was able to move his family to France and live there in a way that marked his life always, surrounded by opinionated helpers, independent-minded children, raucous pets, and hordes of visitors who converged upon Senlis for Sunday lunch and bellowed their way through in setting, but not in kind. Again he drew into his orbit people of all kinds and all convictions, refusing acceptance only to the dull of spirit. As his family grew up and the years went by, he gave them all his passionate conviction of the reality of the land above all, and this is the heritage Ellen Geld carries on today in Brazil.