An Evening with Erik Larson

Erik Larson will be the speaker at the sixth annual Mt. Lebanon Public Library Speaker Series, an event to honor the memory of Joe Wertheim, an avid reader and long-time library patron who had served nine years on the library board, including a term as President, and the President of the Friends of Mt. Lebanon Public Library.

Erik Larson is a master of narrative non-fiction. His vividly written, bestselling books have won several awards and been published worldwide.  His book, Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania, is about the 1915 sinking of the ocean liner Lusitania. Dead Wake was #1 on the New York Times Bestseller list. His book, In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror and an American Family in Hitler’s Berlin, is a vivid portrait of the American ambassador and his family in Berlin during the first years of Hitler’s reign from which Larson has crafted a gripping, deeply-intimate narrative. His critically-acclaimed book, The Devil in the White City, intertwines the stories of the Chicago 1893 World’s Fair and one of America’s worst serial killers. It remained on the New York Times bestseller lists for a combined total of over six years, won an Edgar Award for nonfiction crime writing, and was nominated for the National Book Award.

In his 2006 bestseller, Thunderstruck, Larson chronicles the strange intersection in the careers of Guglielmo Marconi, inventor of wireless, and Hawley Harvey Crippen, England’s second most-famous murderer (after Jack the Ripper). His book, Isaac’s Storm, about the devastating Galveston hurricane of 1900 and the birth of modern American meteorology, became an immediate New York Times bestseller, and won the American Meteorology Society’s prestigious Louis J. Battan Author’s Award. The Washington Post called it the “‘Jaws’ of hurricane yarns.” Among his other books are Lethal Passage about the 1988 school shooting in Virginia and America’s gun culture, and The Naked Consumer, about the ever-increasing amount of private information consumers lose to corporations and other business interests.

Erik Larson graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied Russian history, language and culture. He also received a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. After a brief stint at the Bucks County Courier Times, Larson became a staff writer for The Wall Street Journal, and later a contributing writer for Time magazine. He has written articles for The Atlantic, Harper’s, The New Yorker, and other publications. He has taught nonfiction writing at San Francisco State, the Johns Hopkins Writing Seminars, and the University of Oregon.

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