The Devil in the White City

Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America

by Erik Larson

Crown Publishers, 2003, [First Edition], ISBN 0609608444, illustrated endpapers, hardcover, dustjacket

Very Good Condition, minor edge and shelf wear, no inscriptions, dustjacket in very good condition with a little edge and shelf wear (see photographs)

“Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterised America’s rush toward the twentieth century.  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. The murderer was Henry H. 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.  Burnham 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.  What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, waling the grounds of that dream city by the lake.”