The World’s Fair

Composed shortly after The Great Gatsby came out, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story “The World’s Fair” was an early treatment of material he would eventually transform into Tender is the Night (1934); the character of Francis Melarkey became the novel’s Rosemary Hoyt, and Seth and Dinah Piper were early versions of Dick and Nicole Diver. The story ran posthumously in the Kenyon Review in 1948, the same year that Malcolm Cowley brought out a revised and radically reordered version of Tender is the Night based on notes that Fitzgerald had completed before he died. Cowley included “The World’s Fair” under a different title as an appendix to his edition of the novel. Literary critic, Arthur Mizener (1907-1988) was Mellon Foundation Professor of English at Cornell University from 1951 to 1975. In addition to other works, he authored the first biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Far Side of Paradise (1951) along with a biography of Ford Madox Ford, The Saddest Story: A Biography of Ford Madox Ford (1971).