Gary Krist

Gary Michael Krist is an American writer of fiction, nonfiction, travel journalism, and literary criticism. Before turning to narrative nonfiction with The White Cascade (2007), a book about the 1910 Wellington avalanche, City of Scoundrels (2012), about Chicago's tragic summer of 1919, and Empire of Sin (2014), about the reform wars in turn-of-the-century New Orleans, Krist wrote three novels--Bad Chemistry (1998), Chaos Theory (2000), and Extravagance (2002). He has also written two short story collections--The Garden State (1988) and Bone by Bone (1994). His most recent books are The Mirage Factory: Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles (2018) and Trespassers at the Golden Gate: A True Account of Love, Murder, and Madness in Gilded-Age San Francisco (2025).

Excerpt from Wikipedia, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.