Analysis Of The Devil In The White City By Erik Larson

The Devil in The White City is a nonfiction book, that takes place in the years before, during and after the Chicago’s World Fair in 1893. Erik Larson is famous for writing historical nonfiction; he spends weeks, maybe even months researching the interesting historical events, and writing them for the public to understand in a better context. The two main characters in this interesting historical non-fiction book are; the protagonist, Daniel Hudson Burnham; who is an architect and has built many important structures such as Union Station in Washington D.C. and the Flatiron Building in New York. The antagonist, H.H. Holmes; a doctor that is famous for being one of the most notorious serial killers of all times, especially the urban killings.

Alone, he was able to find all the information needed to get his readers informed about a big part of our U.S history, while still making it interesting through murder. I have learned many things about the Chicago’s World Fair and how important and inspirational it was to the citizens of the U.S. One thing we still see today was the Ferris wheel, which was first made during the World’s Fair, and was there to surpass the complexity of the Eiffel Tower, and distinguish Chicago’s Fair to Paris’s Fair. You see that many innovations were made to make this Fair a success. People from all across the World came to see the successfulness of it. I personally never knew of this Exposition so I found it even more intriguing to think that this had actually happened. Even with the success of the Fair, we still see the many hardships that in the modern world we would never think could happen, such as the amount of deaths, the tension, and how people reacted to this events. It seems so fictional, but is all historically accurate. I also saw that Larson’s storyline went to even more depth than I would have imagined, each individually named person in this story was connected to either character, and had a distinguished role in their lives. With this book I also learned more about the time period, and how dangerous it used to be. In the book, you see the bad side of Chicago and how it affects

Such as during the production of the Fair, many people were easily injured and killed when constructing it. Showing how unsafe jobs like these were, and how desperate people were to make money. Another interesting thing was something that occurred all throughout the book; H.H Holmes’s charm. In every chapter that H.H Holmes was in, he used his charm in some way to give himself an advantage, and get himself out of trouble. For some reason these people that wanted things like his money and wanted to question him about missing people, H.H Holmes figuratively “waves his finger” and they go away for the time being. Even people that suspected him for murder like Mrs. Lawrence with the mysterious disappearance of her friend Emeline, she never reported this to the authorities. This shows how easy it was for Holmes to get away for all of his illegal activities and how corrupt cities like Chicago were. No matter who suspected him, they never did anything, I was surprised at the end when he was arrested for insurance fraud, out of all things. It was then that Detective Frank Geyer was able to dig deeper into Holmes’s past and everything that he had gotten away with. One thing that caught me off guard was the big ending to Part 3 when the World Fair was reaching its closing day, where a whole chain of