The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America

Larson describes turn-of-the-century Chicago as a Hephaestus forge of businessmen on the make, sometimes at any cost: “[The city] got bigger, taller, and richer; but it also grew dirtier, darker, and more dangerous. A miasma of cinder-flecked smoke blackened its streets and at times reduced visibility to the distance of a single block, especially in winter, when coal furnaces were in full roar” (27).

French editor Octave Uzanne described it as “that Gorgon city, so excessive, so satanic” (28). In the atmosphere of enterprise of late 18th century America, the devil became the country’s doppelgänger. Entrepreneurial devils dance through the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s 1839 “The Devil in the Belfry” has the devil disturb the commerce of a small town by causing the local clock to strike 13. Satan’s trickery is, Poe suggests, an expression of the urge for gain itself. In Mark Twain’s short story, “Sold to Satan,” American innovation is powered by Satan—an ominous anticipation of nuclear power, considering Twain wrote the short story in the wake of Marie Curie’s discovery of radium. In Twain’s The Mysterious Stranger, Satan laughs not only at the dark side of the American spirit but gives

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