COLORADO; By Louis Bromfield

New York and London: Harper & Brothers, Publishers, 1947. First Edition with letters "I-W" on Copyright page = Sept. 1947. Cloth. Near Fine/Good. 8vo, black cloth with gilt label on spine, archival polyester-protected pictorial dust jacket (front flap has price $2.75 but slight paring at lower edge), 263 pages + [1] Colophon. Better than Average Copy: solid cloth with small chip on label & gift Inscription on front free endpaper. Dust jacket is bright with several chips around its edges. Set in Silver CIty, bestselling Colorado deals with larger-than-life Silver Boom characters. <br/><br/>Louis Bromfield (1896 - 1956) was an American author and early conservationist. A bestselling novelist and associate of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway in the 1920s, he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1927 for his third novel, Early Autumn, about his wife's Puritan New England background. <br/><br/>Thereafter, he received the French Legion of Honor for his work helping Americans who had been wounded in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.<br/><br/>During the Depression and Roosevelt years, Bromfield learned about the ruinous causes of the Dust Bowl, and adopted techniques used by the Soil Conservation Corps, CCC, and organic farming advances made in India. As a result, he dedicated himself to the " New Agriculture" in the late 1930s. He became one of the earliest proponents of sustainable and organic agriculture in the United States.<br/><br/>A pilot project involved his founded of the experimental Malabar Farm near Mansfield, Ohio [now a State Park], which played an influential role in the early environmental movement.