Erik Larson

Erik Larson's books include Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, The Devil in the White City, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and won an Edgar Award for fact-crime writing, In the Garden of Beasts, about how America’s first ambassador to Nazi Germany and his daughter experienced the rising terror of Hitler’s rule, and Isaac’s Storm, about the giant hurricane that destroyed Galveston, Texas in 1900.

The Splendid and the Vile, Larson's latest nonfiction thriller, offers a close-up view of Winston Churchill's first year as Great Britain's prime minister.

From Larson's BookPage interview with Christy Lynch:

The subjects you’ve tackled over the course of your career are quite broad and varied. Is there any common thread that unites your interests?

There’s no particular common thread, other than story. I’m always looking for compelling historical events that can be rendered in narrative form, with a beginning, middle and end, so that readers can get caught up in the action and live through it as if they didn’t know the ending. So that’s first. But a corollary motive is to answer the question: What was it like to have lived through that event? Then it becomes a matter of finding the right real-life characters whose experience provides the richest insight.

What compelled you to zoom in and write about this particular slice—just his first year as prime minister—of Churchill’s life and the lives of his family?

What drove me was an interest not so much in exploring that first year but rather in learning how Churchill and his family and inner circle actually went about surviving Germany’s aerial campaign against Britain. I mean, how really do you cope with eight months of near-nightly bombings—essentially a succession of 9/11s? It just happened that the Luftwaffe’s campaign coincided, rather neatly, with that first year. In fact, the year ended with...[read on]

See six books Erik Larson keeps returning to.

--Marshal Zeringue