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Devil in the White City takes place in Chicago, during the great World’s Exposition Fair in the 19th century.  The fair was extravagant. The buildings were huge and the architects and fair planners looked forward to an attendance rate of two hundred thousand people each day that the fair would be running, which was about six months. That means that altogether, they hoped that the overall attendance would be at about thirty six million people.
Some may argue that the architects and designers of the fair created it to be overly extravagant, implying that they had an air of arrogance about them. It is entirely true; the designers and the architects even admitted it themselves. The reason behind the extravagant buildings was that they wanted the Chicago Fair to be much better than the Paris Fair held a few years earlier. The greatest monument of the Paris Fair was the tower that Eiffel designed, and it was this tower that architects wanted to top in the Chicago Fair. Multiple designs were rejected that could have easily been better than the Eiffel tower, but apparently they weren’t good enough to surpass it. Until, of course, they accepted the design of a rotating wheel submitted by Ferris.
Multiple other occasions also added to the arrogance of the fair. Buffalo Bill wanted a day where all of the children could get into the fair for free (he was thinking of the orphans at this time), but officials didn’t like that idea because they wouldn’t get any profit from the boost of attendance. This displays the minds of the officials in that they were focused on the financial aspect of the fair, not making the fair better for the civilians of the world.
While these may suggest a darker, destructive parallel, they certainly do not necessarily automatically engender it. The fair does not automatically lead to destruction. While the fair was very arrogant to say the least, there were many positive aspects from the fair. Without the fair, we wouldn’t have had some of the modern everyday occurrences. Some inventions were on the smaller scale, such as Cracker Jack and Shredded Wheat. The most significant invention was probably Ferris’s wheel, which was the symbol of the entire Chicago Fair.
The only destructive parallel was the fact that H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer, performed his murders around the fair. He built a hotel near the fair in anticipation of flocking guests from around the United States and around the world as well. His murders were able to go unnoticed because of the hustle and bustle of the fair, so one might argue that if the fair never happened, these innocent lives would be saved. There would also be a counter-argument to that: What if more murders would happen because the fair did not happen? Who is to say that Dr. H. H. Holmes would not have found somewhere else to execute his murders and remain unnoticed?
But ultimately, the fact that many single women seeking employment (his target for his murders) came to Chicago because of the opportunities the fair provided, the fair contributed to a destructive parallel.

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The ineluctable conflict between good and evil is revealed in the book Devil in the White City by Erik Larson, the story of the World’s Exposition Fair that took place in Chicago in 1893. The story takes two main points, each side taking turns in the chapters of the book. The first is the view of Burnham, an architect who organized the fair, and the second is Dr. H. H. Holmes, America’s first serial killer. Good is represented by Burnham, who tries his best to improve the fair and make it the best that it can possibly be. Evil is represented by Dr. H. H. Holmes, who seems to only think about gaining finances, taking advantage of women, and murdering women or those who get in the way of his plans. While these men are both drastically different, with Burnham helping society and Holmes silently disrupting it, the two actually have a lot in common with each other. Both men are architects. Burnham pursues architectural design as a career, and started up his own business practice. Holmes is also an architecture even though he is a doctor. Holmes planned out a hotel in which he hired many, many men to build parts of. Only Holmes knew what the overall design of the hotel was because he was the only one who managed the overall layout, and went through workers very quickly. Some workers would only build a little bit of the hotel before Holmes fired them to make sure that they didn’t know every intricacy of the building. Both men are ambitious. At a very young age, Holmes became very successful financially. He also finished college and medical school, something that’s not very common among serial killers. During the months before the fair, Burnham stresses how important it is to finish every building in time for opening day.
Good and evil conflict in quite a few ways. There is, of course, the obvious reason that Holmes is murdering those who would attend the fair and thus therefore he is hurting the profit of the fair. But that’s only the surface. The doctor’s activity is chilling and horrific, that it may lead one to question their own safety. Holmes is, after all, the first serial killer in America. Anyone would be concerned for their own safety or for the safety of their family. The fair was created to bring families together in awe of what Chicago could offer. It wasn’t something that just an individual went to; rather, the families were always brought along for the vacation. The murders disrupted the peaceful family ideal by striking panic and fear among those who knew about them. Holmes murdered mainly women. These women, however, were women who were new to Chicago and the idea of freedom. He was able to take advantage of them, something that a typical “bad guy” would do. Unfortunately for these girls, though, Burnham isn’t the typical “good guy” who will save them from the villain. Just who is the “good guy”? Or is there no good guy at all?