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

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The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America Paperback – February 10, 2004

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#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.

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Popular Highlights in this book

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“Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood.”
Highlighted by 7,180 Kindle readers
The exposition went with Westinghouse, and helped change the history of electricity.
Highlighted by 3,755 Kindle readers
In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred violent deaths. Four a day.
Highlighted by 3,036 Kindle readers

From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Engrossing . . . exceedingly well documented . . . utterly fascinating.” —Chicago Tribune

“A dynamic, enveloping book. . . . Relentlessly fuses history and entertainment to give this nonfiction book the dramatic effect of a novel. . . . It doesn’t hurt that this truth is stranger than fiction.” —The New York Times

"So good, you find yourself asking how you could not know this already." —Esquire

“Another successful exploration of American history. . . . Larson skillfully balances the grisly details with the far-reaching implications of the World’s Fair.” —USA Today

“As absorbing a piece of popular history as one will ever hope to find.” —San Francisco Chronicle

“Paint[s] a dazzling picture of the Gilded Age and prefigure[s] the American century to come.” —Entertainment Weekly

“A wonderfully unexpected book. . . Larson is a historian . . . with a novelist’s soul.” —Chicago Sun-Times

From the Inside Flap

Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America?s place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. 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.

From the Back Cover

Bringing Chicago circa 1893 to vivid life, Erik Larson's spellbinding bestseller intertwines the true tale of two men--the brilliant architect behind the legendary 1893 World's Fair, striving to secure America's place in the world; and the cunning serial killer who used the fair to lure his victims to their death. 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.

About the Author

Erik Larson is the author of six national bestsellers—The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm—which have collectively sold more than ten million copies. His books have been published in nearly twenty countries.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Black City

How easy it was to disappear:

A thousand trains a day entered or left Chicago. Many of these trains brought single young women who had never even seen a city but now hoped to make one of the biggest and toughest their home. Jane Addams, the urban reformer who founded Chicago's Hull House, wrote, "Never before in civilization have such numbers of young girls been suddenly released from the protection of the home and permitted to walk unattended upon the city streets and to work under alien roofs." The women sought work as typewriters, stenographers, seamstresses, and weavers. The men who hired them were for the most part moral citizens intent on efficiency and profit. But not always. On March 30, 1890, an officer of the First National Bank placed a warning in the help-wanted section of the Chicago Tribune, to inform female stenographers of "our growing conviction that no thoroughly honorable business-man who is this side of dotage ever advertises for a lady stenographer who is a blonde, is good-looking, is quite alone in the city, or will transmit her photograph. All such advertisements upon their face bear the marks of vulgarity, nor do we regard it safe for any lady to answer such unseemly utterances."

The women walked to work on streets that angled past bars, gambling houses, and bordellos. Vice thrived, with official indulgence. "The parlors and bedrooms in which honest folk lived were (as now) rather dull places," wrote Ben Hecht, late in his life, trying to explain this persistent trait of old Chicago. "It was pleasant, in a way, to know that outside their windows, the devil was still capering in a flare of brimstone." In an analogy that would prove all too apt, Max Weber likened the city to "a human being with his skin removed."

Anonymous death came early and often. Each of the thousand trains that entered and left the city did so at grade level. You could step from a curb and be killed by the Chicago Limited. Every day on average two people were destroyed at the city's rail crossings. Their injuries were grotesque. Pedestrians retrieved severed heads. There were other hazards. Streetcars fell from drawbridges. Horses bolted and dragged carriages into crowds. Fires took a dozen lives a day. In describing the fire dead, the term the newspapers most liked to use was "roasted." There was diphtheria, typhus, cholera, influenza. And there was murder. In the time of the fair the rate at which men and women killed each other rose sharply throughout the nation but especially in Chicago, where police found themselves without the manpower or expertise to manage the volume. In the first six months of 1892 the city experienced nearly eight hundred homicides. Four a day. Most were prosaic, arising from robbery, argument, or sexual jealousy. Men shot women, women shot men, and children shot each other by accident. But all this could be understood. Nothing like the Whitechapel killings had occurred. Jack the Ripper's five-murder spree in 1888 had defied explanation and captivated readers throughout America, who believed such a thing could not happen in their own hometowns.

But things were changing. Everywhere one looked the boundary between the moral and the wicked seemed to be degrading. Elizabeth Cady Stanton argued in favor of divorce. Clarence Darrow advocated free love. A young woman named Borden killed her parents.

And in Chicago a young handsome doctor stepped from a train, his surgical valise in hand. He entered a world of clamor, smoke, and steam, refulgent with the scents of murdered cattle and pigs. He found it to his liking.

The letters came later, from the Cigrands, Williamses, Smythes, and untold others, addressed to that strange gloomy castle at Sixty-third and Wallace, pleading for the whereabouts of daughters and daughters' children.

It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root.

This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group (February 10, 2004)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 447 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0375725601
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0375725609
Lexile measure ‏ : ‎ 1170L
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 15.2 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.16 x 0.99 x 7.94 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #1,722 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #7 in U.S. State & Local History
- #8 in Serial Killers True Accounts
- #20 in Murder & Mayhem True Accounts

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4.3 27,326 ratings

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Erik Larson is the author of six previous national bestsellers—The Splendid and the Vile, Dead Wake, In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac’s Storm—which have collectively sold more than twelve million copies. His books have been published in nearly forty countries.

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Bruce Loveitt

A Beautifully Constructed Patchwork

Reviewed in the United States on March 3, 2003

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If you read "Isaac's Storm," you have some idea of Mr. Larson's writing ability. Still, that book did not prepare me for this experience. With "The Devil In The White City" the author has moved the bar up a notch. He has several major themes and a few minor ones and he succeeds in meshing everything together seamlessly. First, we have the story of the Chicago World's Fair of 1893. Mr. Larson gives us the background, explaining the competition between various American cities that lobbied Congress for the right to hold the fair. New York, Chicago, Washington D.C. and St. Louis all wanted the fair. (The pressure was on to outdo the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1889.) The "upper-crust" of Chicago was especially anxious to prove to New York City that Chicago was much more than a place where animals were slaughtered and butchered. They wanted to demonstrate that Chicago had "class" and culture. Once Chicago won the competition to hold the fair, the race was on to design something spectacular and to get it built by the deadline that had been set. Mr. Larson introduces us to Daniel Burnham, the fair's director of works, and brings us into the offices of Burnham and the other architects and details the difficulties involved in getting such a diverse group of people, some with very large egos, to cooperate with one another. The author provides crisp character studies of Burnham, his partner John Root, Louis Sullivan and other famous architects, as well as Frederick Law Olmsted, who was eventually convinced to come on-board, despite being around 70 years old, to do the landscape architecture. Mr. Larson explains the physical details of putting the fair together and the bureaucratic jungle that Burnham had to hack his way through in order to accomplish his goal. The author tells us about some of the products that were introduced or popularized at the fair, such as Juicy Fruit gum, Cracker Jack, Aunt Jemima's pancake mix and Shredded Wheat ("shredded doormat, some called it). One of the many things Burnham had to worry about was to come up with something to "out-Eiffel, Eiffel" as Gustave Eiffel's tower had amazed the world when it was "unveiled" in Paris in 1889. Mr. Larson has a lot of fun with some of the crackpot ideas that were suggested to Burnham....one of which was to build a complex set of towers-within-towers, which could be telescoped to expand and contract at will. The inventor suggested putting a restaurant at the top but, Mr. Larson writes, "... possibly a bordello would have been more apt." As you can see, the story of the fair could easily have been a subject for an entire book, but Mr. Larson chose to also tell the story of Henry Holmes, the charming serial killer who operated just outside the confines of the fair. Details of his background are provided, and we are brought deep into his hellish world and are shown how he enchanted, killed and disposed of his victims...who were usually young women, but also included small children. Holmes had big, blue eyes and when talking to women he would always maintain eye contact and appear to be fascinated by what they were telling him. He would establish intimacy by touching them on the arm. But he also had a personality that could win over men, as well as women. He was cultured and soft-spoken and never lost his temper, even when under extreme pressure. He was a gifted liar. In addition to his "skills" as a killer, he was able to buy things without paying for them....managing to put creditors off for months and years because they not only believed his lies, but also just couldn't help liking him. Again, Mr. Larson manages to flesh out this portion of the book by bringing some of Holmes's victims to life for us...they are more than just caricatures. The author did a lot of legwork and dug deeply into the primary sources. Extracts from numerous personal letters are provided and people who were later interviewed by newspaper reporters and detectives are quoted. This brings such an intensity to the book that we are happy to have the story of the fair in counterpoint. We are allowed to "come up for air" in alternating chapters. Too much of Holmes at one time would be too much to handle. Finally, if you read "Isaac's Storm" you know that Mr. Larson has a true storyteller's gift. His prose is richly descriptive. One of my favorite sections in the book is where Mr. Larson writes about a meeting of architects in an office building known as the Rookery: "As the light began to fade, the architects lit the library's gas jets, which hissed like mildly perturbed cats. From the street below, the top floor of the Rookery seemed aflame with the shifting light of the jets and the fire in the great hearth." I love the imagery, and the use of the word "mildly" is a great touch. With "The Devil In The White City" you get two great tales, written with beautiful attention to physical detail and with the subtle and nuanced psychological portraits usually found in really fine fiction.

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Dawn Vogel

Chicago history

Reviewed in the United States on March 29, 2024

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Unlike most of the books I review, The Devil in the White City is a work of non-fiction. However, Erik Larson certainly weaves a narrative worthy of a fictional book. Intertwining the stories of the Chicago World’s Fair with that of serial killer H. H. Holmes, the story makes stops in the dirty details of Chicago politics and architecture.

The primary story is that of the Chicago World’s Fair, focusing on the architects involved in its design and construction, the myriad delays and problems they encountered, and the ultimate accomplishment of a huge and successful World’s Fair. At the same time, the narrative examines how the influx of people to the city allowed for someone like H. H. Holmes to prey upon unsuspecting victims, the full number of which may never be determined.

Larson is skilled at depicting the historical figures he writes about, while also painting a picture of the sights of the World’s Fair. Though this is a popular history of the topics, and Larson admits to stretching the truth in places, particularly as regards Holmes (who himself stretched the truth about his crimes), it has evidence of thorough research and analysis. I might have preferred more obvious footnotes or endnotes, but that is primarily because as a historian, I know that’s often where some of the best bits can be hidden.

One person found this helpful

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California Dreaming

Inspired by "Blue Velvet"?

Reviewed in the United States on August 28, 2014

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In the movie "Blue Velvet" by director David Lynch, you see a very nice 50s-style city with a small-town feel, where everyone knows everyone else and everyone gets along. Well, that's at the surface level, of course. Mr. Lynch shows what is really happening by taking his cameras and audience beneath the grass, giving a true close-up at the level of the earth and its bugs. You even get to see an ear, an ear that has been obviously cut off, which has now become food for worms. Or at least food for ants, with apologies to William Shakespeare and Hamlet. In other words: what you see on the surface is not really how things are; you have to get under-the-covers to find the dirty reality of it all.

And Erik Larson takes us on a very similar journey here with some very similar themes. You'll learn about the beautiful, classic architecture designed for the 1893 World's Fair in Chicago, ultimately called "The White City." You'll read that Nikola Tesla provided the power for those beautiful buildings, selling off his AC power patents to (I believe) General Electric. You'll almost feel water coming off the wonderful lake with its more wonderful birds, and the cooling effect that it all had on the fair-goers. But when you travel within just a few miles of that fair, you'll look under the covers and see the murders of H. H. Holmes. Well, you'll see at least some of those murders.

If I have any complaints about "Devil in the White City" (DITWC), it would be that not enough time is spent discussing Mr. Holmes and his crimes. One of my favorite chapters discusses how a Philadelphia detective took a multi-city tour, retracing Mr. Holmes' steps, in order to find the missing children of one of the killer's minions. The detective work was amazing, particularly due to the timeframe, and the fact that the detective actually found bodies was remarkable. Given any other detective, the children would have remained buried forever and so would have Mr. Holmes crimes. Even Mr. Holmes was surprised by the find, reading about it in the daily papers from his jail cell. Well, he could just cook up another set of lies to account for it, was what he was thinking. And did.

A while back I watched "The Gray Man," an underrated yet macabre film that I highly recommend, and the work by the detective who caught Albert Fish in similar fashion. It seems that while watching or reading either of these near masterpieces, you will believe that neither detective will ever get his man; the tasks seem impossible. But both did. With all of the forensics, DNA, and tools at detectives' disposal today, it seems that some of the old-school detectives were so much better. They truly put in the leg work to get the job done.

If you're a David Lynch fan, or a fan of architecture in general, this book is certainly for you. If you're into true crime? Sure, still a recommendation, but even though I'm going five, mostly due to tremendous research and even better writing -- one could argue the author's storytelling skills are unmatched -- I still would have preferred to read a little more about one H. H. Holmes myself. Then, peoples' true natures might have been better revealed, under the covers of The White City that soon would turn Black.

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Amazon Customer

Excellent book

Reviewed in Canada on January 7, 2024

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Excellent book at an excellent price 🥂

Fred

A great read!

Reviewed in Italy on April 22, 2023

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This is an exceedingly well written and engrossing account of two dramas, running parallel to each other in time and place and in alternating chapters of the book, depicting the creation and realization of the Chicago Colombian Exposition of 1893, with all its artistic, political, technical, and financial challenges, and the activities of a serial killer operating on its borders.

Leon

Impresionante

Reviewed in Spain on January 13, 2021

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Es una obra maestra tejida como un enorme tapiz.

IMPRESIONANTE.

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Cliente de Amazon

Buen libro

Reviewed in Mexico on December 21, 2018

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Muy bien libro y todo bien con el envío.

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V Vijayaraghavan

Chicago Exposition

Reviewed in India on July 3, 2020

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The novel is a historical account of the exposition in Chicago at the beginning of last centuries. The author contrasts the hero who tools for the exposition and also a villain who revels in killing people. On the whole, it is an interesting read. It was delightful tome as I am a civil engineer who can appreciate the problems faced in construction

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