Erik Larson

Erik Larson is an American writer of narrative nonfiction, born in New York in 1954. He studied Russian history and journalism, worked as a reporter for The Wall Street Journal and Time, and then turned to book-length history told with the pacing of a novel and built entirely on archival sources. “Isaac's Storm” (1999) recounts the Galveston hurricane of 1900; “The Devil in the White City” (2002), which won an Edgar Award, sets the Chicago World's Fair against a serial killer working at its edge. He went on to write “Thunderstruck” (2006), “In the Garden of Beasts” (2011), “Dead Wake” (2015) on the sinking of the Lusitania, “The Splendid and the Vile” (2020) on Churchill during the Blitz, and “The Demon of Unrest” (2024).