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State Fair (novel)State Fair is a 1932 novel by Phil Stong about an Iowa farm family's visit to the Iowa State Fair, where the family's two teenage children each fall in love, but ultimately break up with their respective new loves and return to their familiar life back on the farm. Thomas Leslie, the author of Iowa State Fair: Country Comes to Town, wrote that the novel State Fair is "a surprisingly dark coming-of-age story that took as its major plot device the effects of the 'worldly temptations' of the Iowa State Fair on a local farming family", capturing tensions between urban Des Moines and rural Iowa.

The novel became a bestseller and established Stong as a popular author. Shortly after its publication, the novel was made into a Hollywood film starring Will Rogers (albeit with the addition of a happy "Hollywood ending" not in the book), and was subsequently adapted for the stage and screen several more times, including as a Rodgers and Hammerstein movie musical in 1945.

Plot
The novel follows the Frake family from the fictional town of Brunswick, Iowa. The father, Abel, has a Hampshire boar named "Blue Boy" that he thinks can win the grand championship at the Iowa State Fair. At the beginning of the story, he bets the local Storekeeper that "Blue Boy" will win the grand prize and that the Frakes will all have a good time at the fair and be better off for it when the fair is over. The pessimistic Storekeeper accepts the bet, but also bets that if he (the Storekeeper) loses, something "worse than anything you can think of" will have happened to the Frakes at the fair unbeknownst to Abel.

The mother, Melissa, has a set of pickles and wants to win blue ribbons for them, beating the competition that has won in prior years. Teenage son Wayne has been practicing so he can win at the "hoop-la" ring toss stand and get revenge on the crooked carnival barker who had taken his money and pride in previous years. Teenage daughter Margy just wants to enjoy herself at the fair and take a break from everyday life. Both teenagers are also in the mood for a new romance. Wayne worries that his girlfriend, Eleanor, who has just spent her first year at college and will not be accompanying him to the fair, has gotten too sophisticated for him. Margy meanwhile finds herself bored with her responsible, devoted, but dull boyfriend Harry Ware, who has planned their whole lives as a farm couple already, and will also not be coming to the fair.

At the fair, both Abel's hog and Melissa's pickles win blue ribbons, and both Wayne and Margy meet and fall in love with exciting new people whose backgrounds are very different from their own. At the hoop-la stand, Wayne meets Emily, the motherless daughter of a stock show manager, who lives a rootless life in hotels following horse shows, horse races and carnivals. Emily's father is preoccupied with horses, womanizing and gambling, and leaves his daughter mostly on her own. She uses her inside knowledge of horse racing to make money by betting, wears short skirts, goes to the theater, and drinks alcohol despite Prohibition. She gives Wayne his first drink and seduces him in her hotel room. On their last night at the fair, Wayne proposes, but Emily refuses because, while she loves Wayne, he has been raised to run a farm, and she does not want to give up her cosmopolitan lifestyle to become the hard-working farm wife Wayne would need. Instead, she plans to spend her large sum of horse-racing winnings on one last night of fun with Wayne and then say a "fond farewell" forever.

While riding the roller coaster, Margy also meets a new companion, a reporter for the Des Moines Register named Pat Gilbert. Pat is experienced and widely traveled, having worked in a number of cities and had previous girlfriends; yet, he is attracted to Margy despite her relative lack of sophistication. Margy finds him more exciting than the predictable Harry Ware. Margy and Pat fall in love, she loses her virginity to him in a grove near her family's camp, and he proposes marriage. However, Margy ultimately turns Pat down because, although she loves him, she does not think he would be happy staying in one town such as Brunswick with her. Although Pat tries to convince her that he can adjust, he also has career ambitions to work in New York City, where Margy feels she would be out of her element and unlike Pat, does not have confidence that she could adapt. She realizes that, while she does not love Harry, she loves "his kind of life" and decides to marry Harry instead of Pat.

The Frake family returns home after the fair, with Wayne and Margy both in somber moods. Abel and Melissa have been kept mostly in the dark about their children's romantic escapades during the fair, especially the premarital sex (regarded as a serious moral breach in that time and place, particularly if the partners did not later marry). Therefore, the parents assume that Wayne and Margy are simply sad to see the fair end. Although they are momentarily sad, Wayne and Margy, having each learned a lesson and come of age, are ready to return to the farm and resume their relationships with their previous partners, Eleanor and Harry.

Upon returning home, Abel Frake collects his five-dollar bet from the Storekeeper, since Blue Boy won the grand prize and the family all had a good time. The Storekeeper pays his bet, but looking at Wayne and Margy, he also feels sure that his own prediction came true and something "worse than anything you can think of" happened at the fair without Abel's knowledge.

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