“At 2.3 million copies, this may be the best selling book ever written about Chicago,” reports Chicago Magazine. Making their list of The 10 Best 21st Century Chicago Nonfiction Books, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (2003) is Erik Larson’s “intertwined biographies of Chicago’s greatest builder and its greatest destroyer.”

This captivating narrative nonfiction account of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition (and parallel profile of “serial killer” H.H. Holmes) has sparked the curiosity of countless readers to study the history of the Fair further. Those who have explored the fairgrounds would catch a problem with the magazine’s comment that “[t]he fair was nicknamed the White City after the color of the buildings on the midway.” The White City, of course, referred to the white palaces in the Court of Honor. The Midway Plaisance, in contrast, was full of color.

“Along the Plaisance” by Charles Graham depicts the Midway, the “entertainment district” of the 1893 World’s Fair that offered a contrast to the White City on the main fairgrounds.