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Over the decades, the back-to-the-land movement has waxed and waned in this country. It has always been largely a middle-class phenomenon. The urban poor rarely could afford the luxury of such a venture; the rural poor, being already there, knew how hard it was to wrest a living from the land; and the rich, aside from a few quaint sports, were otherwise engaged.

But some members of the middle class, looking for something more meaningful than the frustrating security of their lives, have succumbed to it from time to time. One of those times was the 1930s — perhaps for the additional, less altruistic reason that the Depression made their lives not so secure.

Whatever this spurt of the back-to-the-land movement may or may not have produced in the way of changed lives, it did bring forth a small crop of interesting books. There was, for instance, “Flight From the City” (1933), by William Borsodi, an advertising executive who fled Madison Avenue for the spiritual enrichment “which comes from contact with nature.” And “Five Acres and Independence” (1934), by M.G. Kains, a practicing farmer who urged on others the notion that “the farm is the safest place to live.”

None of these books left much of a mark, save one: “RFD,” by Charles Allen Smart. The title refers to the old postal designation, Rural Free Delivery. Originally published 70 years ago, in 1938 it became a national best seller and during World War II was printed in a special edition for servicemen overseas. It remains available in paperback.

Smart is, or was (he was born in 1904 and died in 1967), an urban intellectual and writer who, in his early 30s, went with his wife, Peggy, to live on his family’s farm in Ross County in southern Ohio. They took up what was close to a hardscrabble existence in a 100-year-old house with no plumbing and, at first, no electricity and a farmstead that was minimal — two or three cows, a couple dozen sheep, some ducks and chickens, four or five dogs.

It is difficult to say what Smart is doing there. He’s not playing at farming, for he and his wife work extremely hard and, in any case, he is too wise and too poor to take on such a foolish enterprise. The place is run at a loss; income from a nearby farm he owns and lets out to a tenant helps them scrape by.

His motivation is complex — a little Thoreau, a little Marx. He sings Gregorian chants while he milks his cows. He has many observations on farming, some eccentric (though not necessarily unworkable for that), some practical, all fascinating. But what is likely to engage today’s reader is Smart’s account of his neighbors and the life they lead.

His writing is lyrical, but not saccharine. He is wary of his own intellectualizing: “I have some of the dangerous book-ideas and temptations to simplify hastily that are characteristics of literary men.”

Just as the farming folk of Ross County are wary of him, he admires these people deeply. It bothers him that they can make his sophisticated city friends “look like children, dreamers, thistledown on the wind.” Of Mr. Kincaid, the man who leases his other farm, he writes: “It may be that I find in this man an example of that moral fiber, very fine yet unbreakable, that I may lack myself, and that any good American civilization will require.”

There is a lot of this sort of talking to, or arguing with, himself in the book, and it is what gives it its charm. Why do things have to be this way, he seems to be saying; why can’t things be nicer?

Smart is quite taken with the Cooperative movement, which he thinks will have a great future. He also is what the times would have regarded as a little Bolshie: “The profit technique, which opened up this country to agriculture and industry, is now quite obviously ruining it for both.”

Still, the essence of the man and his book does not lie in that sort of speculation, but in this: “If I have sheep for 40 years, my mind may wander slowly all over the place, like sheep, but I may be worth listening to.”

And that he is — especially now, with fuel prices soaring and household budgets plummeting, creating some of the conditions and fears that led to the writing of “RFD” and other books of its kind.

Roger K. Miller, author of the novel “Invisible Hero,” writes the blog .

Nonfiction

“RFD,” by Charles Allen Smart, $17.95