Louis Bromfield, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, established one of the most significant homesteads in Ohio on his Malabar Farm. Today it receives thousands of visitors a year from all over the world; once the site of the wedding of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, it was a successful prototype of experimental and conservation farming.

This lively, outspoken, and affectionate memoir preserves all things Louis Bromfield fought for or against in a life marked by surging vitality and gusto. He came from an Ohio family whose roots were in the land before the land was lost. He had his father's love of the land, and from his willful mother a hunger to know the world. From the New York City of theaters, concerts, parties, and novels, and a life in France that his success allowed, he finally returned to Ohio and established a new order for his family and friends, and for his followers, a new orbit into which they were drawn.

Ellen Bromfield Geld wrote a memoir of the man who was Louis Bromfield, father and friend, tyrant and “Boss,” alive always to whatever was worth responding to in people and in places, yet complex and lonely as a writer must essentially be to work at his craft. Now revived in paperback thirty-five years after its first publication, The Heritage remains a moving tribute and the recreation of a remarkable human being.

A revived work of twentieth-century fiction that spans years and continents to satirize and explore religious fanaticism and expat life.

First published in 1928, Louis Bromfield’s The Strange Case of Miss Annie Spragg is a haunting and genre-defying tale—a thoughtful reflection on religion and human nature with the propulsion of a mystery. Set in Italy and the American Midwest, this surprisingly modern novel now has a new introduction by Bromfield biographer Stephen Heyman.

The novel opens on a ragtag community of American expats in rural Italy. When Annie Spragg, a local eccentric, dies with stigmata on her body, the diocese tasks the skeptical Mr. Winnery with investigating whether actual miracles occurred at her deathbed. From there, the novel brings us back to Annie’s origins as the child of a cult-leader and prophet on the American frontier. As the story unfolds, Bromfield traverses time and continents as he weaves together satire, mysticism, and psychological insight to explore themes of religious fanaticism, repression, and redemption.

Heyman’s new introduction situates Annie Spragg within Bromfield’s literary evolution—from chronicler of liberated women to environmental visionary—and reintroduces readers to a writer whose influence shaped both American letters and sustainable agriculture. This edition invites fans of twentieth-century fiction to rediscover a novel that remains provocative and poignant today.