When Suppertime Came

The story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank in a freak storm on Lake Superior in Nov­ember 1975, killing twenty-­nine crew, is legend, thanks in part to a Gordon Lightfoot song that most Canadians over forty can recite from memory. Numerous niche publications have been written about the ship’s fateful voyage, including Frederick Stonehouse’s The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, from 1977, William Ratigan’s Great Lakes Shipwrecks and Survivals: Including the Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, from 1994, and Elle Andra-­Warner’s Edmund Fitzgerald: The Legendary Great Lakes Shipwreck, from 2009. To mark the thirtieth anniversary of the sinking, Michael Schumacher, who once wrote a biography of the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, published Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald, in 2005. Schumacher has now edited The Trial of the Edmund Fitzgerald, a volume of transcripts from the United States Coast Guard hearings...