“This book,” the author tells us in his preface, “is intended to be a picture of life on a farm in Southern Ohio in the 1930s.” It is a faithful portrait of farm life as thousands of men and women experienced it from one end of the country to the other and from pioneering times to the present century. Originally published in 1938 to enthusiastic reviews and commercial success, RFD is the story of one couple’s trials with leaving the comforts of city life for a chance to get back to the land. From his farm near Chillicothe, Ohio, Charles Allen Smart gives a realistic rendering of what it meant to farm in the 1930s. It is part of the book’s intrinsic honesty that it could not be as good as Walden . Thoreau had worked out a philosophy that suited him and that he was ready to recommend to others. Mr. Smart had no prescription for the general ailments, beyond a belief that creating things is important and that owning, buying, and selling things are unimportant. What he tells us throughout this unusual book is that for him life on this particular farm, in this particular house, with this particular set-up of friends, neighbors, dogs, sheep, hens, cattle, trees, corn, vegetables, grass, and weather, costs less in human values than life in New York City—or in Chillicothe. Ohio University Press is especially pleased to reissue this midwestern classic with a new foreword by noted farm writer Gene Logsdon. In this 1938 best seller, Smart reveals how he gave up his life as a novelist and teacher to run an inherited farm in the boonies of Ohio. He and his wife raised livestock and crops while trying to remain intellectually active through the community's limited theater offerings. Along with his description of farm life, he contemplates America's material lust and more. Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. “What a welcome resurrection! Here is a voice from the 1930s that speaks to the dilemmas we're certain to face in the next century. His mind moves easily between farming and philosophizing, between strategies for the survival of households during the Great Depression and strategies for the renewal of our ailing civilization. I would have walked a long way to meet this man. I'm glad to have his book.”—Scott Russell Sanders, author of Hunting for Hope “This is a wonderful book. It is delightful. Smart comes across as so honest and passionate. He would have been a wonderful neighbor. I could have learned from him.” —David Kline, author of Scratching the Woodchuck: Nature on an Amish Farm “What a welcome resurrection! Here is a voice from the 1930s that speaks to the dilemmas were certain to face in the next century. His mind moves easily between farming and philosophizing, between strategies for the survival of households during the Great Depression and strategies for the renewal of our ailing civilization. I would have walked a long way to meet this man. I’m glad to have his book.”—Scott Russell Sanders Charles Allen Smart , born in Cleveland in 1904, was raised on the East Coast and died in his adopted home near Chillicothe in 1967. “Organic nature is not, I think, completely sober, and we cannot be so if we wish to understand her, and smile. Our sober little minds are cold, and she is warm and large.”“Good farming is more complex, even, I think, than good juggling or good painting, and the odds against perfection are even greater. I have never seen a farm that justified a sour face, and too many good farmers go around looking as though they were attending their own funerals, as indeed they are.“If I have sheep for forty years, my mind may wander slowly all over the place, like a sheep, but I may be worth listening to.”“But isn’t good farming a means? And, if so, can it be so emphasized, refined, perfected that it becomes a thing of beauty, and an end, in itself?”“The hardest weather, for me, is the weather of attrition, the last week of ten weeks of rain, the fourth flood, a dry hot September after three earlier months of it in a row, the last short days of January, the last savage snowstorm in March . . . ”“We are peculiarly at the mercy of markets, because our methods and plans cannot be changed quickly, and because we have fewer sources of business information. Also, our opponent, nature, can make our best strength and brains look very small and futile, overnight. However, she is also our partner, and she has incomparably greater dignity than any other opponents and partners.”“What I’d like to see on dressed-up farmers and wear myself is kilts, with soft, loose, low collared shirts, and very short jackets. And I’d like to see beards . . . A clean-shaven face may be appropriate for a modernistic apartment or office, where everything else is clean-shaven and sexless, but it is not appropriate on a farm. A razor is as timid and citified a thing as a girdle to flatten buttocks whose glory is their curves, or a brassiére to lift up breasts that can be lifted in health and pride, or a pair of pants with bu