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The Devil In The White City by Erik Larson is a Non-Fiction Narrative story that takes place in the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. The story tells of how Daniel Burnham, the lead architect of the project, and John Root, Burnham's right-hand-man, made their idea of an architectural fair come to life. Mock-ups of famous attractions, large palaces, and immense amounts of quartz-lined buildings filled the streets of Chicago during this festival. As fairgoers took in the wonders of the fair, a murderer by the name of Dr. H. H. Holmes plotted how to turn these visitors into his next victims. Many different faces become wrapped into the plot as time ticks by to find the mysterious murderer of the Chicago World's Fair.

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The original book cover of The Devil In The White City:

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Erik Larson, born January 3, 1954, is an American-Born author and journalist of nonfiction literature. Larson has been widely celebrated by many, winning awards such as the Edgar Award for Best Act Crime and Goodreads Choice Awards Best History & Biography for some of his works. He currently lives in New York, New York City with his spouse Chris Larson. (Link leads to a transcript of Larson telling his life story)

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To begin with, I was born in Brooklyn. Like half the planet. Birthdate: Jan. 3, 1954. I spent a couple of years in Brooklyn, but have really only one clear recollection-of being bitten by my upstairs friend/neighbor, John H-. I lived briefly in Central Islip and Massapequa, but mostly grew up in Freeport, Long Island, a suburb of New York City, and had three main pursuits: climbing tall trees, riding my bike to the far reaches of the island (typically without my parents' knowledge), and body-surfing at Jones Beach (field no. 9). At first I wanted to be a New Yorker cartoonist. For a year or so during my junior-high years I sent my work to the magazine. I seem to recall my cartoons being returned within 24 hours, though surely that can't be the case. Next I wrote a novel. It was 75 pages long and had a sex scene, even though I had no idea what sex was. I loved it when I got to stay home from school for a cold or some other illness. Yes, once I feigned being ill by putting the thermometer under the hot-water faucet. When I think about it now I'm pretty sure my mother guessed, because a 112-degree F temperature is pretty high. When I did get to stay home from school I read the Dumas brothers and drew things. I drew for hours and hours on end. I did have a high-school girlfriend, Michelle G--, who in fact shaped my destiny. It was because of her that I went to the University of Pennsylvania. She dumped me two weeks later. This was hard. I recovered. She undumped me. We dated another six months. Then she dumped me again. But I was happy. I studied Russian, learned to drink vodka from a real Russian prince, fought acne by wearing underwear on my head to keep the hair off my face, and graduated Summa Cum Laude. My first job was in New York as an editorial assistant, meaning gopher, for a publisher in New York. On the way to my interview I stopped in Penn Station to use the men's room. When I flushed the john, out came a spume of blue water. I got the job anyway, a pity hire, clearly. But I enjoyed the work. Two editors fought over me, not because I was particuarly talented or good looking, but because they hated each other and had offices with big glass windows that faced each other across a narrow corridor, which only amplified their hatred. I became their pawn. Each would sit me down in front of the big glass window and try to be charming, so that the other saw and suspected that gossip was being traded. This was hard until I caught on. Then it became fun, and again I was happy. I saw All the President's Men, and again my life was changed. I went to journalism grad school at Columbia University. On one of my first assignments I was standing under the West Side Highway when a pigeon, or possibly a large goose, crapped down the face of my new London Fog raincoat. I didn't know it until I began conducting man-on-the-street interviews and one of my subjects kindly pointed out that I stunk like hell and should go look at myself in a fucking mirror. On graduation day former-mayor John Lindsay was sitting in the row behind my family. At the conclusion of the ceremony, my mother stood up and told him he was the handsomest man she had ever met. This was embarrassing. My first journalism job was for the Bucks County Courier Times in Levittown, Pa., a great spot to start my career. One day they passed me over for a promotion I dearly wanted and hired a new guy instead. I immediately shipped my resume to newspapers all over the planet and got hired by the Wall Street Journal. The job changed my life and shaped my future in ways I cannot even begin to describe. I tried as much as possible to avoid the main mission of the journal, which was to write business news, and concentrated instead on feature stories for Page One. My favorite: A story on video-dating that caused Bob Woodward to launch an investigation of me. So there WAS something that Nixon and I had in common. I hit it off so well with one of my video women that we ended up dating for about nine months. In the story I called her Emily; after it ran I received maybe 500 letters, including at least one marriage proposal. I also got a call from a female reporter for the Washington Post who told me that Woodward didn't believe the dating story and its result. This struck me as very funny, given that the Post had only recently won a Pulitzer for a story that had been fabricated from the ground up. However, I arranged a clandestine conversation between the reporter and "Emily." I never heard from the Post again, at least not in that capacity. At some point I grew tired of writing journalism. One day the managing editor summoned me to New York, to a breakfast at Windows on the World in the World Trade Center, where I knew he planned to offer me a job as bureau chief in one of the paper's key bureaus. I told him no. Soon afterward, I got married-blind date, of all things-and my wife and I moved to Baltimore, where I wrote a couple of unpublished novels, did some respectable free-lance pieces, helped raise some babies, and wrote my first book, The Naked Consumer, about how companies spied on individual consumers. I loved that book. No one else did. This was hard, but I was happy. One thing led to another and now I've got five books under my belt. I live in Seattle with my blind-date wife and three daughters. The corpses of numerous beloved rodents are buried in my yard. I love to cook, I play too much tennis, I drink too much red wine, I like martinis and humor dry, I think Airplane is the finest comedy ever made, and I was reading dark moody Swedish detective stories decades before the "Girl Who" books appeared.

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To begin with, I was born in Brooklyn. Like half the planet. Birthdate: Jan. 3, 1954. I spent a couple of years in Brooklyn, but have really only one clear recollection-of being bitten by my upstairs friend/neighbor, John H-.

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Daniel Burnham, born in 1846, was the lead architect of the Chicago World's Fair and played the role of the protagonist in the novel. He worked closely with John Root to make the architectural wonders of the Fair possible. On the days that the World's Fair ran, Burnham focused more on the attractions of the fair without knowing a serial killer was on the prowl for his next victims. Burnham and murderer H. H. Holmes never had any official interactions until after he had been caught by the authorities.

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Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, commonly referred to as H. H. Holmes, was an American Born doctor who went on a murderous rampage from 1891 - 1894. Holmes committed the majority of his crimes during the Chicago World's Fair. He is believed to be America's first serial killer, with only 9 confirmed kills and over 200 suspected murders. These real-world events lead to his large role in The Devil In The White City.

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The Devil In The White City, as previously explained, is based upon the real world events of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Today, this moment in American history is seldom talked about among people. This fact brought up an interest about why Erik Larson, author of the novel, decided to retell the story. The video clip below is an interview with Larson where he explains his though process when writing this text.

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The Origin of Larson's 'Devil in the White City'

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"In Graceland Cemetery, to the north, young couples raced their sleighs over the snow-heaped undulations, pulling their blankets especially tight as they passed the dark and dour tombs of Chicago's richest and most powerful men, the tombs' bleakness made all the more profound by their juxtaposition against the night-blued snow."

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"Nowhere was civic pride a more powerful force than in Chicago, where men spoke of the "Chicago Spirit" as if it were a tangible force and prided themselves on the speed with which they had rebuilt the city after the Great Fire of 1871."

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The Devil In The White City has been a highly praised book by many. Some love the in-depth description of the architecture, while others enjoy the true murder story entangled in the text. In this audio clip, a woman briefly explains her thoughts on the story, summarizing what she personally felt about it. Her criticisms and complements closely mirror the wide spread opinions held by many.

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Review The Devil in the White City by Erik Larson

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"Olmsted, for his part, knew that Burnham had been a leading force in driving buildings into the clouds. Burnham was said to be the business genius of his firm, Root the artist."