The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

While The Naked Consumer won Larson some good reviews, it wasn’t until 1999, when he published Isaac’s Storm, his bestselling history of the 1900 Galveston Hurricane, that one of his books experienced significant national success. In 1992, he published his first full-length book, The Naked Consumer, about invasions of privacy in modern business. Within five years, he was working as a staff writer for the Wall Street Journal, while also contributing articles for other prestigious publications like Harper’s, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic. In 1978, he graduated from the Columbia School of Journalism.

Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others. Erik Larson’s gifts as a storyteller are magnificently displayed in this rich narrative of the master builder, the killer, and the great fair that obsessed them both.Erik Larson grew up in Long Island, and studied Russian History at the University Pennsylvania, where he graduated summa cum laude (“with highest honors”). The Devil in the White City draws the reader into a time of magic and majesty, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B. What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds-a torture palace complete with dissection table, gas chamber, and 3,000-degree crematorium.īurnham overcame tremendous obstacles and tragedies as he organized the talents of Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles McKim, Louis Sullivan, and others to transform swampy Jackson Park into the White City, while Holmes used the attraction of the great fair and his own satanic charms to lure scores of young women to their deaths. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The true tale of the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago and the cunning serial killer who used the magic and majesty of the fair to lure his victims to their death.

The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson