The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz

Erik Larson is an American journalist and the author of several works of narrative historical nonfiction, including Dead Wake, about the sinking of the Lusitania during World War I; In the Garden of Beasts, about the family of the American ambassador to Germany and his family in Hitler-led 1930s Berlin; Isaac’s Storm, covering the events of the 1900 Galveston hurricane; and The Devil in the White City, which tells of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the concurrent murders committed by the serial killer H. H. Holmes. The latter book, which is being adapted into series by Leonardo DiCaprio and Martin Scorcese, was a National Book Award finalist and won an Edgar Award for fact crime writing, while Tom Hanks is slated to produce a film adaptation of In the Garden of Beasts.

Larson studied Russian history, language, and culture at the University of Pennsylvania and earned a master’s degree in journalism from Columbia University. He was a staff writer at The Wall Street Journal and a contributing writer to Time Magazine, and his writing has been featured in The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications. Larson has taught non-fiction writing at San Francisco State University, Johns Hopkins, and the University of Oregon.