"Devil In The White City" Author Erik Larson Speaks at Goucher

August 31, 2009 |

Erik Larson, a bestselling author and National Book Award finalist, will present a free, public lecture on Monday, August 31, at 7:30 p.m. in the Hyman Forum of Goucher College’s new Athenaeum.

His The Devil In The White City: Murder, Magic and Madness at the Fair That Changed America was assigned as Goucher’s 2009 summer reading for incoming first-year and transfer students. For more information about the event, please call 410-337-6333.

Larson spent decades as a cultural affairs and business reporter and as a part-time author and unpublished mystery writer before he turned to historical nonfiction. In 1999 he published Isaac’s Storm: A Man, A Time, And The Deadliest Hurricane In History, an account of how one meteorologist failed to predict the devastating 1900 Galveston hurricane and the a social, political, and scientific backdrop to the tragedy.

He followed that book with the bestseller The Devil In The White City, which 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. The Devil In The White City was nominated for a National Book Award and won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category.

Thunderstruck, published in 2006, uses dual narratives to describe one of the most notorious murders of the early 20th century. The book interweaves the stories of Harvey Hawley Crippen, a seemingly mild-mannered doctor who murdered his wife, and Guglielmo Marconi, the inventor who created the wireless telegraph — the device that helped capture Crippen as he fled.

Larson is also the author of two previous books, Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun (1994) and The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992).

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.

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