Erik Larson

Erik Larson is an American journalist and author known for narrative nonfiction. He began his nonfiction career in newspapers in 1978, later moving into magazine work and books. His journalistic background remains visible in histories built from letters, diaries, official records and other archival sources.

Larson often selects events with a strong dramatic arc, then reconstructs them through the experiences of people who lived through them. His subjects range from the Galveston hurricane in Isaac’s Storm and the sinking of the Lusitania in Dead Wake to an American diplomatic family in Hitler’s Berlin in In the Garden of Beasts. The Splendid and the Vile follows Winston Churchill during the Blitz, while The Demon of Unrest traces the months between Abraham Lincoln’s election and the attack on Fort Sumter.

His best-known work, The Devil in the White City, interweaves Daniel Burnham’s struggle to build the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair with the crimes of H. H. Holmes. It was a National Book Award finalist and won the 2004 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime.

Start with The Devil in the White City. Its movement between the fair’s immense construction project and Holmes’s concealed violence shows Larson’s method at full strength: documented history arranged with the mounting pressure of a thriller.