Best-Selling Author Erik Larson, Wife, Buy Southampton Property For $2.2 Million

Does the Hamptons have room for one more successful writer? We’re about to find out. The best-selling author Erik Larson and his wife, the noted neonatologist Dr. Christine Gleason, have purchased a home on Leos Lane in the Village of Southampton for $2.2 million.

The handsome 2,200-square-foot house has four bedroomons h three baths and recently received a fresh coat of paint. There is a separate master wing above a spacious living room, and the dining room features a wood-burning stove. The outside deck is adorned with a gas grill. For exercise, there is a community tennis court, or downtown is a short bike ride away.

Mr. Larson, a Brooklyn native, grew up on Long Island then went off to the University of Pennsylvania where he studied Russian history. He later graduated from Columbia University with a graduate degree in journalism. Bless his heart, Mr. Larson then became a newspaper reporter, first for a Pennsylvania newspaper, then for the Wall Street Journal. As his career expanded, articles appeared in Time magazine, The New Yorker, and the Atlantic Monthly. His third book earned his first best-seller-list nod: “Isaac’s Storm,” about the hurricane that devastated Galveston, Texas in 1900.

It was his next book, published in 2003, that put Mr. Larson at the top of such lists, and for years. “The Devil in the White City” was about a 19th-century serial killer during a World’s Fair. It has been reported that a big-screen version is being developed which will reteam the actor Leonardo DiCaprio with the director Martin Scorsese, whose other collaborations include “The Aviator” and “The Wolf of Wall Street.” In subsequent years, Mr. Larson has published three more nonfiction books, including last year’s best-seller “Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania.”

His wife, Dr. Gleason, is quite accomplished in her field too. Since 1998, she has been on the staff at the Seattle Children’s Hospital and is a professor of pediatrics. Her primary clinical interest is in the care of high-risk newborns, especially those born after only 23-24 weeks gestation, which is known as the “limits of viability.” In 2013, Dr. Gleason began a six-year term as secretary-treasurer of the American Pediatric Society. She is also an author, of a memoir titled “Almost Home: Stories of Hope and the Human Spirit in the Neonatal ICU.”

Though the couple will no doubt enjoy Southampton, the primary residence for them and their three daughters is in Seattle, and Mr. Larson’s web site informs that “numerous beloved rodents are buried in his back yard.”