Erik Larson
Erik Larson
Erik Larsonis an American journalist and author of nonfiction books. He has written a number of bestsellers, such as The Devil in the White City, about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and a series of murders by H. H. Holmes that were committed in the city around the time of the Fair; The Devil in the White City also won the 2004 Edgar Award in the Best Fact Crime category, among other awards...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth3 January 1954
CountryUnited States of America
I'm very perverse. If someone tells me I have to read a book, I'm instantly disinclined to do so.
Chicago has disappointed her enemies and astonished the world
Leaves hung in the stillness like hands of the newly dead.
Beneath the gore and smoke and loam, this book is about the evanescence of life, and why some men choose to fill their brief allotment of time engaging the impossible, others in the manufacture of sorrow. In the end it is a story of the ineluctable conflict between good and evil, daylight and darkness, the White City and the Black.
Time lost can never be recovered...and this should be written in flaming letters everywhere.
I must confess a shameful secret: I love Chicago best in the cold.
I was born with the devil in me,' [Holmes] wrote. 'I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing.
Beneath the stars the lake lay dark and sombre," Stead wrote, "but on its shores gleamed and glowed in golden radiance the ivory city, beautiful as a poet's dream, silent as a city of the dead.
It was so easy to disappear, so easy to deny knowledge, so very easy in the smoke and din to mask that something dark had taken root. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history.
I thought I'd go to a bookstore and see what moved me.
His weakness was his belief that evil had boundaries.