Malabar Farm in Pleasant Valley was created by Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Louis Bromfield from several older farms and became the embodiment of his dream of restoring neglected land through innovative agriculture and conservation. Born in 1896 in Mansfield, Bromfield studied agriculture at Cornell University and journalism at Columbia University before leaving to serve as an ambulance driver for the French Army. After the war he returned to the United States, built a successful literary career, married Mary Appleton Wood in 1921, won the Pulitzer Prize for his third novel Early Autumn, and returned to France in 1927, remaining there until the outbreak of World War II brought him back to Ohio with his wife and three children. He wrote 33 books and numerous film scripts, earned the O'Henry Short Story Award, and saw some of his novels published in more than 15 languages and some in as many as 25. In 1939 he bought acreage from several neglected farms and used funds from selling motion picture rights to his fiction to operate the new farm, naming it after the Malabar coast of India, the setting for The Rains Came. There he applied his concept of grass farming to renew the soil while improving forage and pasture, used contour plowing and intermittent grass strips to reduce erosion, built ponds for fire protection, irrigation, and livestock, and managed woodland, fencerows, trees, and shrubs to support wildlife as well as farming. A focal point of the farm was the Big House, Bromfield's 32-room mansion, designed with architect Louis Lamoreux from an existing farmhouse in a Western Reserve style inspired by northeastern Ohio houses and furnished in a predominantly French theme with antiques and original artworks collected during his travels. Malabar Farm drew both farmers exchanging ideas and Hollywood visitors seeking a peaceful retreat, and Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart were married before its twin staircase and spent their honeymoon there. Bromfield hoped the house and the hills, valleys, and woods of Malabar would one day belong to the state, and after his death in 1956 the house remained as it had been and the farm became a state park in 1976, continuing as a living part of Ohio's rural heritage.