Authoring several books on economics, Borsodi's work, This Ugly Civilization, published in 1929, brought him national attention. Four years later, his bestselling book, Flight from the City, appeared as the country was mired in the depths of the Great Depression. Firing the imagination of struggling families, many with low-paying inner city jobs and an aimless future, the book described a way to seek out a good agrarian lifestyle and graphically detailed his own family's experiences and accomplishments at homesteading in Suffern. In 1935, Borsodi launched Bayard Lane, a small experimental cooperative community on a rolling unimproved tract of at the foot of the Ramapo Mountains.
