1939: The Lost World of the Fair
David Gelernter recreates the 1939 New York World's Fair as the high point of a confident American century that was about to be tested by war. He weaves a historical account of the fair, its planners, and its pavilions with an invented narrative of two fictional fairgoers who walk readers through the grounds. The result is part history, part essay, part novel, an experiment in form that fits the Fair's own utopian spirit. Gelernter cares about the design, the optimism, and the engineering of the moment, but also about how quickly the world it imagined would be gone. The book reads as a love letter to an America of streamlined trains, modernist architecture, and faith in the future.
What you might want to know about 1939: The Lost World of the Fair
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A part-history, part-imagined visit to the 1939 New York World's Fair, told as a snapshot of America just before the Second World War.
On his One Grand Books picks Hanks wrote that the reader will go to the Fair with two of the most fascinating people to ever live in a book, pointing to the imagined fairgoers Gelernter uses as guides.
Both. Gelernter pairs a researched account of the Fair with an imagined pair of visitors, making the structure a hybrid of history and narrative.
1939: The Lost World of the Fair was written by David Gelernter, published in 1995 by Avon Books.
1939: The Lost World of the Fair is 416 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, 1939: The Lost World of the Fair takes most readers 6 to 9 hours to finish.
1939: The Lost World of the Fair is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.
