The Devil in the White City

The Devil in the White City is Erik Larson's 2003 narrative-nonfiction book, the breakthrough work that established Larson as the strongest contemporary popular historian and that defined a generation of subsequent narrative nonfiction. Larson braids two simultaneous Chicago stories from 1890-1893: the architect Daniel Burnham's increasingly desperate effort to build the World's Columbian Exposition (a national showcase to rival the 1889 Paris Exposition where Eiffel's tower had just been built), and the serial killer H. H. Holmes (Herman Mudgett), who operated a residence hotel in the Englewood neighborhood three blocks from the fairgrounds and used it to murder an unknown number of women and at least three children.

Larson's structural method is the formal innovation that the book made canonical. The alternating chapter structure (Burnham, then Holmes, then Burnham again) treats both narratives as parallel constructions of late-nineteenth-century American Gothic ambition. The Burnham chapters are some of the strongest popular-history writing about late-nineteenth-century architectural and civic engineering ever produced; the Holmes chapters are restrained and meticulously sourced rather than sensational. The contrast between the two enterprises (one a public good built at enormous personal cost, the other a private predation enabled by the same urban anonymity) is the novel's quiet moral argument.

Recommended as required contemporary narrative-nonfiction reading, as the right Larson entry point, and for fans of David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon, Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief, and Larson's own subsequent work (Thunderstruck, In the Garden of Beasts, Dead Wake, The Splendid and the Vile). The Scott Brick audiobook is the definitive audio production. Five stars without reservation.