What makes the story all the more chilling is that Holmes really lived, walking the grounds of that dream city by the lake.Ĭlick for More Information About the Book that Inspired the Film. Clue: The Devil in the White City author Larson. ERIK LARSON is the author of four national bestsellers: In the Garden of Beasts, Thunderstruck, The Devil in the White City, and Isaac's Storm, which have collectively sold more than 5.5 million copies. Much attention was focused on the largest cities in the USA as they vied for the honour of hosting the world fair. 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. The Devil in the White City is a history of the bidding, creation and construction of the Chicago World Fair 1893, the Columbine Festival in honour of the 500th anniversary of Columbuss discovery of the new world. Holmes (DiCaprio), 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. He is assassinated during his fifth term, casting a pall over the last months of the World’s Fair. 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 charismatic, blue-eyed, five-time mayor of Chicago who enjoys a reputation as a man of the people despite his actual elite education. Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City. This was Chicago, on the eve of the greatest fair in history. 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.

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 in the White City Quotes Showing 1-30 of 243. Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorsese are partnering up once again to bring Erik Larson’s bestselling THE DEVIL IN THE WHITE CITY to the big screen.

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