Barriers Burned Away

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 chaplain at Gettysburg 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.