The Devil in the White City Lesson Plan

Why do you think Larson begins the story aboard the Olympic two decades after the events of the 1893 Chicago World's Fair, rather than chronologically at the beginning of the lead-up to the fair?

Beginning the book in 1912 allows Larson to interweave various periods of time in the history of building the World's Fair that would otherwise be difficult to combine. In this first section Larson sets his stage, laying out the setting, the characters, and the conflict. The setting is of course Chicago, the nation’s second most populous city, which suffers from the “eastern perception that [it] was nothing more than a greedy, hog-slaughtering backwater," a city “that preferred...