The Devil in the White City by Erick Larson Essay example

The pair of twins sat down in their homeroom class. One was gentle and charming, and the other was intelligent and had a great future in store. Being twins one would think they were very alike but secretly they were different. Sitting in homeroom no classmate would think that they were sitting next to a new definition of evil. In The Devil in the White City by Erick Larson, he decides to include different styles of ambition and appearance vs. reality to illustrate, that ambition can break one or make one and everything is not what it seems. Larson’s style is to add to irreverent stories together so that the two major protagonists highlight each other’s traits, one trait is their ambition. Both Holmes and Burnham are ambitious but in two†¦show more content†¦His ambition was to create a game which involved the suffering of others. Killing people created him a sort of pleasure, â€Å"Holmes was enjoying himself. He had arranged the insurance fraud for money, but the rest of it was for fun. Holmes was testing his power to bend lives of people† (Larson 355). Holmes always looked for people that he saw as weak and he used them to create his game which to him was to see how far he could go in changing a person’s life. While Geyer was investigating the disappearances of the Pitezel children he said that all criminals had a motive but no one really saw clearly what Holmes’ motive was. Later Geyer was drawn to the conclusion of Holmes wanting to have power over people’s lives. Holmes wanted to control people and produce others a suffering as he did when Carrie Pitezel was put in a hotel by Holmes in front of the hotel her children were in, without any of them knowing, that was his game. In the novel both Burnham and Holmes had ambitions but both had very different ambitions, which led their lives in different paths. Burnham by having the ambition to want Chicago to prosper became America’s best architect. Holmesà ¢â‚¬â„¢ ambition took him to jail and eventually to his death. The novel The Devil in the White City, illustrates that everything is not what it seems using the character Holmes and the creation of the World’s Fair. Holmes was known as a charming doctor that starstruck every woman that he laid an eye upon. It was said byShow MoreRelatedThe Good And Evil Of A City : Erick Larson s The Devil1528 Words   |  7 Pages The Good and Evil of a City: Erick Larson’s The Devil in the White City Larson’s The Devil in the White City was written during the time of 1890’s era of the Chicago World Fair and culture in the American’s utopian ideals. Larson will introduce the main character Daniel Burnham and his connection with the 1893 Chicago World Fair and the foreshadowing of many death within the chapters. Throughout the book, Larson will be discussing that evil exists in the American city during the time of the fairRead MoreDr. H. H. Holmes: Americas First Serial Killer Essay1527 Words   |  7 PagesErick Larson wrote in Devil in the White City, â€Å"I was born with the devil in me. I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing – I was born with the Evil One standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered in the world, and he has been with me since† (Troy, Taylor). This statement was a quoted confession from Dr. H. H. Holmes himself in 1896. Holmes was the first major s erial killer in America, even though he came after many others