Erik Carson's The Devil In The White City

Quoted by George Orwell, authors write to “desire push the world in a certain direction, to alter other people’s ideas of the kind of society that they should strive after.” It is human nature to achieve an idealistic community, being essentially the “best of the best” as societies progress in history. Erik Carson also implements this as a purpose in his book The Devil in the White City. He described the events before and leading up to the creation of the 1893 World World’s Fair in Chicago led by Daniel H. Burnham, an event aiming to surpass and “Out-Eiffel” the superior architectural building at the time- the Eiffel Tower. This was the purpose of Carson: to push the world in the direction towards achieving greatness that was the World’s Fair. Carson also introduced the direction that the world should stray away from, which was the wickedness and cruelty of murderer H.H Holmes. By contrasting the two men’s life events, with Holmes and his Holmes portraying the bad, and Burnham and the World Fair portraying the good in humanity, supported by characterization and setting, it conveys how the world should be …show more content…
For example, when referring to Holmes’ decision in choice of women to which he tortures and kills, they would need to have an “amalgam of isolation,weakness, and need.”, further elaborated by saying how “Jack the Ripper had found it in the impoverished whores of Whitechapel; Holmes saw it in transitional woman,” (199). By paralleling Holmes with Jack the Ripper, a notorious murderer causing the haunting cases of murder, it portrays Holmes as a sinister man with no humanity, which deters the world to be pushed into a direction of evil such as Holmes. In contrast to this, Burnham displayed the ambitious nature of people to achieve greatness, seen when Olmsted (the landscaping architect) was