State Fair

This novel, published in 1932, is set in pre-Depression Iowa and was the basis for a successful Rodgers & Hammerstein musical. As the title suggests, the main action takes place at the state fair in Des Moines. The Frake family make an overnight journey from rural Iowa to Des Moines to attend the fair, bringing a prize boar for competition. Their children, Margy and Wayne, have each had romantic rows before they leave for the fair and they both find love at the fair. The novel emphasises the long-term incompatibility of the two cultures that can happily embrace for the duration of the fair but are ultimately too far apart. A more recent Des Moines writer, Bill Bryson, wrote in The Lost Continent about this same dichotomy: “When I was growing up I used to think that the best thing about coming from Des Moines was that it meant you didn't come from anywhere else in Iowa... During the annual state high school basketball tournament, when the hayseeds from out in the state would flood into the city for a week, we used to accost them downtown and snidely offer to show them how to ride an escalator or negotiate a revolving door. This wasn't always so far from reality.”

 The author, Phil Stong (born 27 January 1899), grew up in rural Iowa. He studied at Drake University in Des Moines and at Columbia University in New York City.  In 1924 and 1925 he worked as a reporter for The Des Moines Register before marrying and moving to New York. His first literary success came in 1932 with the publication of this novel. In the following year,  his second novel, Stranger's Return, was also well received (like State Fair, it was also successfully adapted for the screen). His attempt in 1935 to move away from his Iowan-themed fiction with Week-End, set in high-class Connecticut, was a failure and he returned to his successful regional focus in numerous further novels as well as children's books (including the award-winning Honk, the Moose in 1935), a biography and an autobiography.

The author sums up the experience of the Frake family of the momentous fair:
“With surprise Abel Frake realised that he was glad... that he was going home. He was gorged with excitement and the triumphs of that strange place, reality, as he had made it for himself, pleased and satisfied him. The Frakes had stepped for a moment into a fantasy; now, unchanged, they were returning to that five hundred acres where only birth and death — not even marriage — had been the only changes for four generations.”