Summer Reading Selection 2009

Release date: June 01, 2009 |

This summer, new students at Goucher College will explore the extraordinary technological progress and emerging urban threats that helped shape the United States in the 20th century by reading and discussing The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair that Changed America by Erik Larson. The book is Goucher’s 2009 summer reading assignment for incoming first-year and transfer students.

Selected based on suggestions from faculty and staff, The Devil in the White City is meant to spark discussion among new students, staff, and professors during Goucher’s fall orientation session. This summer, incoming students will receive a copy of the book and study guide questions to foster group conversation during a daylong discussion of the book and its themes that will be held on Monday, August 31.

The Devil in the White City tells the story of the World’s Columbian Exposition held in Chicago in 1893 to commemorate Christopher Columbus’s discovery of America. The book intertwines the true tales of two men: Daniel Hudson Burnham and Dr. Henry H. Holmes. Burnham, the chief architect and mastermind of the exposition, inadvertently created a perfect setting for Holmes, one of America’s first serial killers.

In a short period of time, Burnham was forced to overcome the death of his partner and numerous other obstacles to construct the famous “White City” around which the fair was built and which was meant to assert America’s place in the world. His efforts to complete the project, and the fair’s incredible success, are skillfully related along with entertaining appearances by Buffalo Bill Cody, Susan B. Anthony, and Thomas Edison.

The activities of the sinister Dr. Holmes, who is believed to be responsible for scores of murders around the time of the fair, are equally remarkable. He devised and erected the World’s Fair Hotel—complete with a crematorium and gas chamber—near the fairgrounds and used the event, as well as his own charismatic personality, to lure and murder victims.

Combining the stories of an architect and a killer in one book, mostly in alternating chapters, Larson creates a conceit of the forces that would shape the 20th century into a time of monumental technical achievement and insidious social ills.

Larson is the author of the international bestseller Isaac’s Storm and Thunderstruck and was nominated for a National Book Award for The Devil in the White City. He is a former features writer for The Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, where he is still a contributing writer. His magazine stories have appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, and other publications.

He has taught nonfiction writing at the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, San Francisco State University, and the University of Oregon.