Erik Larson was born in Brooklyn in 1954 and grew up in Freeport, Long Island. In 1976, he graduated summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania after studying Russian history. Lethal Passage

Before attending graduate school, Larson says he saw the movie All the President's Men, which influenced him in his decision to apply to the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He graduated from Columbia with an M.S. degree in 1978 and began working at The Wall Street Journal. After being transferred to San Francisco, he met his future wife, with whom he moved to Baltimore when she was hired at Johns Hopkins University. In Baltimore Larson began working as a freelance journalist. Tiring of "the grind of doing periodic pieces," he started working on his first book, The Naked Consumer: How Our Private Lives Become Public Commodities (1992). This was soon followed by Lethal Passage: How the Travels of a Single Handgun Expose the Roots of America's Gun Crisis (1994), which investigated the legislative loopholes and national attitudes toward guns that allowed sixteen-year-old Nicolas Elliot to purchase the weapon he used in a deadly 1988 school shooting. These books, though well-reviewed, did not earn Larson widespread popular attention.

This, however, was about to change. In 1994, Larson read Caleb Carr's novel, The Alienist, and was struck by its evocative Isaac's Storm

depiction of 19th-century New York City. He began to wonder if he could achieve a similar effect with a nonfiction crime story. His subsequent research led him to the grisly case of Dr. H. H. Holmes, a serial killer who operated a hotel near the site of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893. Dismissing the Holmes case as overly sensational, Larson instead pursued another incident which led him to investigate the 1900 hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas. The Galveston hurricane became the subject of Isaac's Storm: A Man, a Time, and the Deadliest Hurricane in History (1999). Weaving the story of the hurricane into a suspenseful narrative with U.S. Weather Bureau station chief Isaac M. Cline at its heart, Isaac's Storm received warm reviews and became a national bestseller.

For his next project, Larson continued to work within the historical narrative form and returned to the story of Dr. Holmes and the 1893 World's Fair. He became interested in reexamining the Holmes case when he investigated Holmes' relationship to the Devil in the White City

World's Fair and realized that Holmes' career had certain parallels to that of fairgrounds architect Daniel Burnham. Juxtaposing Holmes' elaborate scheme to lure victims into his hotel with Burnham's efforts to construct the Fair's beautiful buildings against tremendous odds, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair that Changed America (2003) met with great success, reaching the top of the New York Times bestseller list, becoming a National Book Award finalist, and winning Larson an Edgar Award for "Best Fact Crime." A film adaptation of The Devil in the White City is tentatively scheduled for a 2011 release.

Larson's most recent book, Thunderstruck (2006), again assumes the form of historical narrative, this time centering on inventor Guglielmo Marconi's attempts to patent his wireless telegraph in England and the telegraph's role in the 1910 capture of murderer Hawley Crippen. Like its predecessors, Thunderstruck quickly became a national bestseller and was praised as a vivid and entertaining rendering of a historical era.

Larson currently resides in Seattle, Washington, with his wife, three daughters, and a dog named Molly.