RFD: Charles Allen Smart

"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." RFD 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. Charles Allen Smart was a New York novelist and prep-school teacher when he inherited his aunt's farm in Chillicothe, Ohio. He and his wife moved into a rustic stone farmhouse, determined to combine their lives as working farmers with their active intellectual life, love of art, and political progressivism. They upset some in their small town by staging parts of Clifford Odets's play Waiting for Lefty, but they won respect for their hard work and honest dealings. Smart conveys the feel of their lives at a time when living in the country was a meaningful distinction in America. He also writes movingly of his concerns regarding America's materialism, the rise of industrial agriculture, burgeoning chain stores, and frayed communities. Told with sensitivity, gusto, and a fierce honesty, RFD became a classic because embedded in its charms as a first-rate farm memoir is the universal story of one couple's earnest, joyful attempt to live meaningful lives.Ohio University Press is especially pleased to reissue this midwestern classic with a new foreword by noted farm writer Gene Logsdon.

About the Author :
Charles Allen Smart, born in Cleveland in 1904, was raised on the East Coast and died in his adopted home near Chillicothe, Ohio, in 1967. Smart wrote eleven books, but he remained best-known for RFD (derived from the old rural-free delivery postal designation), a national bestseller that was reprinted in a wartime edition for servicemen overseas.

Review :
"It is not at all easy to get at the sprawling message of this book in a few words. It would not be such a good book if one could. It is full of wisdom without setting out to be wise, and the wisdom is of the sort that comes out of sweat and simple satisfactions." ---The New York Times, upon RFD's first publication "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