#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER - NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST - From the #1
New York Times bestselling author of The Splendid and the Vile comes
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.
"As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find."
--San Francisco Chronicle
*
Combining meticulous research with nail-biting storytelling, Erik Larson
has crafted a narrative with all the wonder of newly discovered history
and the thrills of the best fiction.
*
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 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. The murderer was Henry H.
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.
Burnham 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. What makes the story all
the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of
that dream city by the lake.
The Devil in the White City draws the reader into the enchantment of
the Guilded Age, made all the more appealing by a supporting cast of
real-life characters, including Buffalo Bill, Theodore Dreiser, Susan B.
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.
