Fish Tales: The History of the L.C. Bates Blue Marlin Caught by Ernest Hemingway

Susan F. Beegel will present her illustrated lecture, “A Hemingway Marlin in Maine,” that was inspired by the L. C. Bates Museum’s skin mount of a blue marlin caught by Hemingway off the island of Bimini in 1935. She calls the talk “a wild fish chase across the first half of the twentieth century” that will tell the story of two men connected by a big fish — Maine taxidermist Fred C. N. Parke and author Ernest Hemingway. It’s a story about changing environments from Maine to Cuba, and a story about what happens when we fail to respect both the fragility and power of the sea.

Susan F. Beegel is a retired Professor of English who taught in the Williams College-Mystic Seaport program. Editor Emerita of The Hemingway Review, an academic on the life and work of Ernest Hemingway, she has published four books and more than fifty scholarly articles on aspects of American literature and history. She is an authority of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, and has been an enthusiastic traveler to the author’s “islands in the stream,” including Key West, the Dry Tortugas, Bimini, and Cuba.