The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * 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.

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 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. 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.