Being a “passionate chewer” of Juicy Fruit himself, Larson was struck by the fair’s lasting influence on modern-day society, and he realized the book he wanted to write wasn’t just about the fair or Holmes’s nearby murders. “This was the specific trigger … the fulcrum on which my life subsequently spun,” Larson said. One footnote mentioned that Juicy Fruit gum debuted at the fair. He started researching that, instead-paying special attention to the footnotes of books, “because that’s where the good stuff, frankly, usually is,” he explained in a WSJ+ Books talk. … And Juicy Fruit gum inspired his focus on the 1893 World’s Fair.īut while reading about Holmes, Larson did come across a reference to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive world’s fair in Chicago that attracted some 27 million visitors over a six-month period. Holmes, Larson initially dismissed him “because he was so over-the-top bad, and I did not want to do a slasher book,” as he said in a 2003 C-SPAN interview. The story-particularly its immersive setting-prompted Larson to consider writing about a real-life murder from the era, so he borrowed an Encyclopedia of Murder from the library and started looking for a suitable candidate. ( From the publisher.In 1994, Larson read Caleb Carr’s The Alienist, a bestselling novel from that year about a psychiatrist who investigates murders in late-1890s New York City (and the basis for the TNT television series of the same name). In this book the smoke, romance, and mystery of the Gilded Age come alive as never before. Anthony, Thomas Edison, Archduke Francis Ferdinand, and others.

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.

What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.' 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.īurnham 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. 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. 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 devil and the white city book