A rich man's son loses everything and takes work in Chicago as a hand — and then, in October 1871, the city burns for three days. Roe was a Presbyterian minister and a former army chaplain who came to see the ruins, decided the fire needed a novelist, and wrote his first book about it; it sold enormously and he never went back to the pulpit. The fire is eyewitness reporting. Fifty-three plates by painters including John Sloan and Eastman Johnson follow the city from Bleecker Street to Greenwich Village, matching Roe's account of the streets that burned.
