Larson, Erik

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Erik Larson

Personal

Married Christine Gleason (a physician); children: three. Education: University of Pennsylvania, degree, 1976; Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, degree, 1978.

Addresses

Home—Seattle, WA. Agent—David Black, David Black Literary Agency, 156 Fifth Ave., Suite 608, New York, NY 10010.

Career

Author, journalist, and teacher. Wall Street Journal, New York, NY, feature writer; Time, New York, NY, senior writer; San Francisco State University and Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, Baltimore, MD, instructor; lecturer.

Awards, Honors

National Book Award for nonfiction nomination, 2003, and Edgar Allan Poe Award nomination, Mystery Writers of America, 2004, both for The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and the Madness at the Fair That Changed America.

Writings

The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities, Holt (New York, NY), 1992.

Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis, Crown (New York, NY), 1994, published as Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun, Vintage (New York, NY), 1995.

Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, Crown (New York, NY), 1999.

The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and the Madness at the Fair That Changed America, Crown (New York, NY), 2003.

Contributor to periodicals, including Atlantic Monthly and Harper's.

Adaptations

Isaac's Storm was adapted as a sound recording, narrated by Edward Herrman, Random House, 1999; research for The Naked Consumer became the subject of the NOVA documentary We Know Where You Live, broadcast on PBS.

Work in Progress

A true-life crime story, tentatively titled Thunderstruck: A Story of Love, Murder, and Invention in the Edwardian Age.

Sidelights

Erik Larson is the author of The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and the Madness at the Fair That Changed America, a critically acclaimed work which received a National Book Award nomination in 2003. He has also published the nonfiction works The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities and Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History, a compelling history of Galveston, Texas's great hurricane.

Larson grew up in the village of Freeport on Long Island, New York. He graduated from the University of Pennsylvania in 1976 with a degree in Russian history and culture, and two years later he earned a degree from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism. Working as a journalist, Larson has served as a feature writer for the Wall Street Journal and Time magazine, and he has contributed articles to the national magazines Harper's, the Atlantic Monthly, and the New Yorker.

Pens Consumer Expose

Larson's The Naked Consumer is an investigation of how American consumers have become the victims of consumer espionage; the details of their lives have become readily accessible to marketers who use such details to choose their targets. Larson tells how data can be gleaned from the U.S. Census Bureau, communications services, banks, medical records, deeds, lists, drivers' licenses, and electronic and human spies. With these facts, marketers create profiles based on income, credit, health, status, ethnicity, and spending habits. A Publishers Weekly reviewer noted that the data "then serves as the indispensable basis for insidious commercial appeals that exploit consumers' fears, vanity, and greed." Alexander Star wrote in New Republic that Larson's "most arresting pages detail the development and possible convergence of two devices—the 'passive audience meter' and the supermarket scanner." Larson objects to the Universal Product Code, or bar code, that appears on nearly everything consumers buy, because marketing companies match up what viewers watch on television with what they buy and plan advertising accordingly. He also shows how easily privacy abuse and manipulation are carried out by advertising agencies. A Kirkus Reviews contributor opined that Larson "offers strong ammunition against an enemy so insidious that most people don't even know it's there."

Addresses the Arming of America

Larson wrote a series about the gun culture in America for the Wall Street Journal and studies the subject in more detail in his book Lethal Passage:

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How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis (also published as Lethal Passage: The Story of a Gun). His interest in the subject began in 1980 when his Maryland neighborhood experienced a series of drive-by shootings. He wanted to find out how kids were getting guns, and began with a crime that occurred in 1988, when sixteen-year-old Nicholas Elliot took a Cobray M-11/9 to his Virginia Beach school, where he killed one teacher, injured another, and terrorized students until the semi-automatic handgun jammed, preventing Elliot from inflicting further injury. "Larson's journey discloses a commercial system shot through with venality, social irresponsibility, and ingrained bad habits of skirting legality," wrote Ray Olson in Booklist.

After he found that the gun had been purchased by Elliot's uncle at a gun show, Larson applied for and easily obtained a federal gun dealer's license. Playboy reviewer Digby Diehl wrote that "as a licensed dealer, Larson also became privy to the secret world of gun sales. His thorough investigative report is the most shocking documentation yet of America's gun epidemic, which includes more than 200 million weapons." Larson proposes a five-part omnibus law called the Life and Liberty Preservation Act, which he says would close most of the loopholes in current legislation.

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Lethal Passage a "valiant, innovative, effective, and timely study." An Economist contributor noted of the book that "Larson's purpose is to expose, in plain unvarnished prose, the awful laxity of America's gun industry. He does it as well as it could and should be done."

Profiles the Power of Nature

Isaac's Storm is Larson's study of one of the greatest natural disasters in U.S. history: the storm that hit Galveston, Texas, on September 8, 1900, resulting in the loss of between 6,000 and 8,000 lives. Booklist reviewer Gilbert Taylor said that "although the subject is grim, this telling is a deftly told fable of folly and fate." Larson focuses on the hurricane and on Isaac Cline, chief of the U.S. Weather Bureau's Galveston station, who said in 1891 that "the opinion … that Galveston will at some time be seriously damaged by some such disturbance, is simply an absurd delusion." New York Times Book Review contributor W. Jeffrey Bolster noted that the Weather Bureau "took its cues from its chief, Willis L. Moore, whose insecurity matched his pomposity. Moore wanted his staff to look confident, soothing and precise; he forbade use of alarming words like 'hurricane' unless authorized from Washington. His pettiness trumped his judgment when, at the peak of the 1900 hurricane season, he halted all telegraphed weather communications from Cuba. He would not admit that men he regarded as excitable Latins might have an edge on his Weather Bureau, even though Havana's Belen Observatory had been systematically studying hurricanes for thirty years." A Cuban meteorologist predicted that the hurricane would hit central Texas, but Cline and Moore said it would move up the Atlantic coast. The Cuban meteorologist was proven tragically correct.

"Larson is a very skilled storyteller," wrote Steve Horstmeyer and Jack Williams in Weatherwise, "and the images his writing creates are so vivid the reader will come as close to experiencing this historic storm

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as is possible 100 years after the fact." When the storm hit with gusts of 200 miles an hour, it destroyed one third of the city. A tidal wave decimated Fort Jacinto and carried a steamship two miles inland. A month after it was over, corpses were still being recovered from the debris and burned on pyres. "Larson expertly captures the power of the storm itself and the ironic, often catastrophic consequences of the unpredictable intersection of natural force and human choice," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor. Library Journal reviewer Trisha Stevenson called Isaac's Storm an "unforgettable work."

In the acclaimed 2003 work The Devil in the White City, Larson tells the true stories of architect Daniel Hudson Burnham, the mastermind behind the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago, and Dr. Henry Howard Holmes, considered America's first serial killer. The book opens in 1889, as Chicago officials plan to bring the world's fair to their city; Burnham, who helped design the Flatiron Building in New York City and Union Station in Washington, D.C., was chosen to head the massive project. Facing tight deadlines, bureaucratic mishaps, and disastrous weather, Burnham surpassed all expectations, creating "a thing of ethereal beauty—popularly dubbed the White City—that introduced a stunned American public to movies, zippers, dishwashers, and a bevy of other staples," wrote Daniel Fierman in Entertainment Weekly. Meanwhile Holmes, a pharmacist and expert con man, had built his own personal house of horrors near the fairgrounds, a specially constructed apartment house complete with secret passages, a gas chamber, and a crematorium. When arrested, he confessed to killing twenty-seven women. "To Larson, Holmes was Burnham's dark twin," observed Newsweek critic Malcolm Jones. "Taken together, the stories of how Daniel Burnham built the fair and how Dr. Holmes used it for murder formed an entirety that was far greater than the story of either man alone would have been," Larson told an interviewer on the Random House Web site. The author continued, "I found it so marvelously strange that both these men should be operating at the same time in history, within blocks of each other, both creating powerful legacies, one of brilliance and energy, the other of sorrow and darkness. What better metaphor for the forces that would shape the twentieth century into a time of monumental technical achievement and unfathomable evil?"

If you enjoy the works of Erik Larson

If you enjoy the works of Erik Larson, you may also want to check out the following books:

Sebastian Junger, The Perfect Storm, 1997.

Eric Schlosser, Fast Food Nation, 2001.

Gay Salisbury and Laney Salisbury, The Cruelest Miles: The Heroic Story of Dogs and Men in a Race against an Epidemic, 2003.

The Devil in the White City garnered strong praise from reviewers. In the Writer, Ronald Kovach described the book as "a primer on how a good storyteller uses a sharp eye for color and detail, fictional

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tools, and tight writing to keep a book-length narrative moving briskly." "This book is everything popular history should be, meticulously recreating a rich, pre-automobile America on the cusp of modernity," noted a critic in Publishers Weekly, and Jones concluded, "In the soaring dreams of Daniel Burnham and the hellish ones of Henry Holmes, Larson has paired two unlikely stories that paint a dazzling picture of the Gilded Age and prefigure the American century to come."

Discussing his future writing plans, Larson told interviewer Dave Weich of Powells.com, "Maybe someday I'll do a novel, but right now, I so much enjoy narrative nonfiction. The research appeals to me—I love looking for pieces of things in far-flung ar-chives—but the beauty is that the complexity of the characters is there. You don't have to make it up."

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Book, January-February, 2003, review of The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, p. 23.

Booklist, October 15, 1992, Mary Carroll, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 387; January 15, 1994, Ray Olson, review of Lethal Passage, p. 875; June 1, 1999, Gilbert Taylor, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 1739; February 15, 2003, Kristine Huntley, review of The Devil in the White City, p. 1022.

Business Week, March 14, 1994, Paul Magnusson, review of Lethal Passage, p. 16.

Christian Science Monitor, August 19, 1999, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 21; November 4, 2003, review of The Devil in the White City, p. 17.

Economist, April 30, 1994, review of Lethal Passage, p. 100.

Entertainment Weekly, February 28, 2003, Daniel Fierman, "Vanity Fair," p. 82.

Esquire, February, 2003, p. 37.

Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, spring, 1994, Mary J. Culnan, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 175.

Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 1992, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 1109; February 1, 1994, review of Lethal Passage, p. 119; July 1, 1999, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 1022; November 15, 2002, review of The Devil in the White City, pp. 1676-1677.

Kliatt, May, 1995, review of Lethal Passage, p. 32; May, 2004, Pat Moore, review of The Devil in the White City, pp. 38-39.

Library Journal, October 1, 1992, Sue McKimm, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 100; February 15, 1994, Jim Burns, review of Lethal Passage, p. 174; July, 1999, Trisha Stevenson, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 127; January, 2003, Rachel Collins, review of The Devil in the White City, p. 133.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, February 20, 1994, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 9; March 13, 1994, review of Lethal Passage, p. 2.

New Republic, February 15, 1993, Alexander Star, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 42.

Newsweek, February 10, 2003, Malcolm Jones, "Back to the Future," p. 67.

New York Times Book Review, January 24, 1993, Scott Huler, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 16; March 20, 1994, Clifford Krauss, review of Lethal Passage, p. 11; February 5, 1995, review of Lethal Passage, p. 28; September 12, 1999, W. Jeffrey Bolster, "Wall of Water," p. 46; March 9, 2003, David Traxel, "A Real-life Bates Motel," p. 15.

Playboy, April, 1994, Digby Diehl, review of Lethal Passage, p. 32; September, 1999, Joshua Green, "Stormy Weather," p. 30.

Publishers Weekly, August 17, 1992, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 481; November 22, 1993, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 61; January 31, 1994, review of Lethal Passage, p. 68; December 12, 1994, review of Lethal Passage, p. 60; June 14, 1999, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 56; December 16, 2002, review of The Devil in the White City, p. 57.

Technology Review, July, 1993, John Carroll, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 68.

Time, July 24, 1995, p. 4.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), February 9, 2003, review of The Devil in the White City, p. 1; April 18, 2004, "Reflections on a Success," p. 3.

Washington Post Book World, March 13, 1994, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 12; September 5, 1999, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 6; September 19, 1999, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 1.

Weatherwise, September, 1999, Steve Horstmeyer, Jack Williams, review of Isaac's Storm, p. 56.

Whole Earth Review, winter, 1994, review of The Naked Consumer, p. 97.

World and I, March, 2004, Randy Boyagoda, "City of Gods and Monsters," p. 221.

Writer, September, 2003, Ronald Kovach, "A Devil of a Good Writer," pp. 20-24.