A riches to rags story may seem out of place among a list of the century's agricultural elite. But Louis Bromfield's story is one of a man who felt out of place in a life of celebrity. He preferred instead to pursue a boyhood dream of being, as he once said, "a plain dirt farmer." The pursuit of that dream made him one of the century's most influential conservationists.

Bromfield was born to farm life in Mansfield, Ohio, in 1896, at the height of the Industrial Revolution in middle America. As a boy, he observed how industry seemed to take unfair advantage of the land around it.

Louis loved the land, but his passion for literature as a boy made him a natural when he began working for local newspapers. His father wanted him to become a farmer, but Louis made the difficult decision at 19 to leave the land and pursue a journalism degree at Columbia University.

His first job with the Associated Press meant he was constantly rubbing elbows with New York's social elite. He married a young New York socialite, Mary Wood, in 1921. Shortly thereafter he published his first novel, "The Green Bay Tree," in which a fictional town is taken over by industry and is eventually destroyed by "progress." Critics loved it, and the public did, too. The success led to two more novels following similar subject matter. His third, "Early Autumn," won him the Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Louis relocated to Paris, the fashionable place for writers to live and work. But his passion for the land was weaved throughout his fiction, and in spite of his extravagant tastes, he longed to return to Ohio and get back to his farming roots.

In 1938, he did just that. Louis bought 1,000 acres of land in his native Ohio and dubbed it Malabar Farm. He was a writer by trade, though, and not a farmer. He was surprised to find that the once-fertile land of his childhood had been misused; he was trying to return to farming during the height of the Dust Bowl years.

Bromfield wanted his farm to be self-sufficient and profitable, something the farm experts of the day said was impossible. But Bromfield embraced the ideas of the newly-formed Soil Conservation Service and put them into full practice at Malabar. Within months, the once square fields were contoured to make better use of water and soil nutrients. Yields increased and the farm became lush and productive thanks to conservation practices.

The farm was self-sufficient, but not profitable. Yearly losses at Malabar sometimes totaled five figures. But Bromfield never let go of his extravagant lifestyle; he used his fiction writing to support losses on the farm, and built a 32-room mansion on the land to house himself, his family, his labor, and his guests. Bromfield was still a celebrity, and Hollywood dignitaries would often retreat to Malabar for weeks at a time. Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall were even married on the farm.

Despite the losses, Bromfield continued to experiment with soil conservation practices. His celebrity made him a natural spokesperson for the cause. Malabar became a show farm; Bromfield led weekend tours to demonstrate his practices. At its height, Malabar was attracting 20,000 visitors a year to learn about soil conservation.

Bromfield was the most famous farmer in America, but his farm was not profitable. He was constantly experimenting and paying for the losses from his own pocket. When his writing became less about literature and more about paying bills, he began to lose interest in fiction. One of his last and most successful books was "Pleasant Valley," a non-fiction work about soil conservation and the rebuilding process at Malabar. The book was an influential success; many farmers around the country and around the world learned "the new agriculture" and put it to profitable use.

But the deaths of Bromfield's long-time financial manager and then his wife in quick succession led to even more losses for Malabar. The constant pressure of writing to keep the farm going led to a downturn in the quality of his written work. In 1955, Bromfield was diagnosed with bone cancer. He sold timber rights to his land in a desperate attempt to keep the farm going, but he died a year later with only the rights to his books and what was left of Malabar to his name.

Today, Malabar stands as a tourist attraction and is still a working farm owned by the state of Ohio. Bromfield's legacy is still alive in anything from the sustainable agriculture movment to the now-common soil conservation practices that he revolutionized in his time. "Nothing better can be passed on to future generations than the worthwhile concepts of those who came before us," writes Louis' daughter, Ellen Bromfield Geld, in her book "The Heritage." "In farming, the concepts have to do with conserving our precious soil . . . for this above all is the source of our survival."

She echoes the beliefs of her father, who wrote that, to the farmer, "the soil he walks on is his fortune. The better he treats that soil, the better he knows and understands it, the better off he will be."

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