He was a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist as famous in the 1920s as Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott Fitzgerald. But he cashed in his literary success to finance a wild agrarian dream in his native Ohio.

Realizing that dream would cost him everything: his critical reputation, his fortune, his family, even his grip on reality.

On his deathbed, he considered himself a failure, dismissing his struggle to revolutionize American agriculture as “ludicrous” and even “pathetic.”

Yet the ideas he planted at his experimental farm would inspire America’s first generation of organic farmers and popularize the concepts of sustainability decades before Silent Spring and the birth of the modern environmental movement.