How long does it take to read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America?
by Erik Larson
Checked July 2026
8h 12m
122,925 words at 250 a minute
At 30 minutes a day, you would finish in about 2 weeks.
That is 16 sessions with The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America.
Read it with the Guild45 minutes a day would finish it in about 11 days.
How many words is The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America?
The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America is about 122,925 words, estimated from its 447 pages at about 275 words a page. At 250 words a minute, that comes to 8 hours 12 minutes.
Most reading-time sites default to 300 words a minute. The best evidence we could find, a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies by Marc Brysbaert, puts silent adult reading of English prose closer to 238 words a minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. We use 250. It is slower than the number you will see elsewhere, and it is closer to how people actually read.
This is still a model, not a measurement. When enough ReadersGuild readers have finished The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America, we will replace this estimate with the time they actually took.
How many pages is The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America?
- Pages
- 447
- Author
- Erik Larson
- Genre
- non-fiction
Read it with the Guild
Read The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America at a fire.
ReadersGuild opens soon. You have the hours. The hard part is sitting down for them. Open a fire and up to twenty readers sit with you, each with their own book, and nobody has to remember to log it afterwards.
“I built this once before. People kept their books in it, their sessions, their whole year, and I shut it down. This is me building it again properly, and everyone who was on the first one comes back as an Elder.”
One person, in San Francisco. iOS first, Android on the way.