The Gales of November by John U. Bacon

The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald

By John U. Bacon

Liveright 2025

It’s not often the readers of keyhole histories of minor events will know chapter and verse about the subject at hand, but John Bacon’s new book, The Gales of November: The Untold Story of the Edmund Fitzgerald, has a bit of help in that department that not only helps to close the knowledge-gap but also renders the book’s subtitle faintly ridiculous; untold story? How many stories in the last century have been more told than that of the Great Lakes freighter SS Edmund Fitzgerald, which sank with the loss of all hands in 1975 on Lake Superior? At how many suburban backyard cookouts, on how many summer vacations, over how many recreation room speakers has the story of the Edmund Fitzgerald been told?

The number is far, far beyond counting, thanks to Bacon’s aforementioned bit of help: in 1979, the singer Gordon Lightfoot released his ballad, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald,” telling the story of “that good ship and crew” through the final night and the freakishly powerful storm that claimed the ship and the lives of all on board. Mournful and sonorous as it is, Lightfoot’s song is also one of the most stubborn ear-worms ever created in a recording studio; it’s overwhelmingly likely that every single one of Bacon’s prospective readers has at least heard the song; it’s probable that many of those readers could quote from some of the lyrics. The USS Maine and the RMS Lusitania never had their own soundtrack, and “My Heart Will Go On” never mentions the Titanic. The one piece of luck the Edmund Fitzgerald had was to have her story immortalized in song.

Bacon tells that story in greater detail than any popular press account has previously done, and it’s possible that this detail, about Great Lakes shipping, about American industrial commerce in the 20th century reign of Detroit manufacturing, might constitute that “untold story” business in the subtitle. Certainly there’s more generous backgrounding here than in the three other major histories of this naval tragedy, Robert Hemming’s Gales of November: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald from 1981, Hugh Bishop’s The Night the Fitz Went Down from 2009, and especially this book’s clearest ancestor, Michael Schumacher’s terrific 2005 book Mighty Fitz: The Sinking of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

But the heart of the story is the ship and what happened that night, and everyone who’s ever hear Gordon Lightfoot’s song knows that story: the ship set out and encountered the worst storm in living memory, which Captain McSorley reported in somber terms while the danger was mounting, as Bacon relates:

Although McSorley couldn’t be accused of downplaying the situation, his captain’s pride still held back a measure of the truth: This wasn’t merely “one of the worst seas” he’d faced – it was the worst he’d ever seen, by far, and it was likely the worst anyone had seen on the Great Lakes since at least 1913. In fact, the wind and waves reported on November 10, 1975, both exceeded those of 1913. This was the storm of the century, and McSorley had sailed right into it.

The Edmund Fitzgerald found itself slogging through gigantic waves and howling winds, and Bacon does his best to convey this to his presumably mostly land-lubber readership. “Imagine standing in your kitchen at home, and your house suddenly rises thirty feet, then eight seconds later it falls thirty feet – and keeps going like that for hours,” he writes. “Then it starts rolling back and forth, too, and then tilts to the left in a sickening list.” If anything, this kind of description doesn’t go far enough: first, remove the underlying feeling of grounded safety that a good kitchen produces; next, assume those thirty-foot drops are happening at unpredictable intervals; after that, change the “rolling back and forth” to a kind of violent irregular shaking and sloshing; and finally, imagine experiencing it all while hungry and without having slept for 24 hours. The Edmund Fitzgerald was a big, powerful ship, but as Lightfoot’s song aptly puts it, she was “a bone to be chewed” in such conditions. And as the song famously relates, she sank just fifteen miles from the comparative safety of Whitefish Bay and its lighthouse so well-known to sailors on the lake:

“If you’ve never looked over the big lake’s black water at night to see the Whitefish Bay lighthouse at the end of a stomach-churning trip,” retired engineer John Hayes says, “you could never know what a relief it is to see that bright beam staring at you, what that feels like, what that means. … That lighthouse is a promise. The worst is behind you. You’re going to make it. You’re going to get home.”

The Edmund Fitzgerald sank before it could reach that iconic promise, and this book is the fullest, most involving narrative account the disaster has ever received. Bacon goes into great detail on the ship’s namesake, on the ship’s business, and, in an unexpectedly interesting little side-story, on the initial reporting that made the sinking briefly a national story, particularly the writing of Harry Atkins of the Associated Press and Jim Gaines of Newsweek. It was this early news coverage that reached Gordon Lightfoot in the immediate wake of the disaster. And the rest is history.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He has written regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News