Devil In The White City

People always want to go the extra mile, and plan on things that people thought were impossible to do. The book Devil in the White City, written by Erik Larson, is about the making of the World’s Fair, and the making of a serial killer, H. H. Holmes. The book talks about how the World’s Fair was planned by architects such as: Daniel Burnham, Frederick Olmstead, and Louis Sullivan. It also talks about how Holmes ended up in Chicago and how he started his businesses and his killings. The theme in Devil in the White City is about persistence paying off in the end. Larson uses solid examples of history to make this theme stand out.

The World’s Fair was not easy to build obviously. The architects encountered many difficult storms and terrible weather,

H. Holmes killed many innocent people, but never left evidence of what he did. He sold most of his victims bodies to colleges. How was he caught at the end? Frank Geyer was a detective, and “a big man with a pleasant, earnest face” (Larson 339). He was solving the disappearance of many people including the children of Benjamin Pitezel. Geyer had a trouble time keeping up with Holmes and where he took the children. “Geyer set out on his search on the evening of June 26, 1895, a hot night in a hot summer” (Larson 342). Despite the hot weather, Geyer never gave up on finding the children. “The detectives trudged from one hotel to the next. The day got hotter and hotter” (Larson 343). Geyer and his partner plotted and searched almost every hotel in Cincinnati. Everytime Holmes would check into a different hotel, he would use different names. Geyer had to keep up with his common aliases, so he would not be fooled by Holmes’s tricks. “Howard was one of Holmes’s more common aliases, Geyer now knew” (Larson 346). Geyer had determination on finding these children, and by doing that he had to know the tricks Holmes had up his sleeve. Without Geyer giving up, those children would not have been found, and Holmes would not have been convicted of murder. He kept his persistence, and at the end it all payed off.

When you set your mind to something that you know that would make a difference, never give up because persistence pays off at the end. Larson shows this theme by telling his readers how Burnham never gave up on the fair through the storms and terrible weather, and by showing how Geyer never gave up on finding the Pitezel children through the hot summer and searching through many hotels in