Smugglers & Rum-Runners of Cape Cod

The Alliance continues its popular ACONS (A Celebration of Nantucket Sound) webinar series on Thursday, July 11 at 6pm with celebrated novelist and essayist George Michelsen Foy. George will discuss some of the fascinating history of Smugglers and Rum-Runners on Cape Cod, and Nantucket Sound in particular. Prohibition certainly brought an explosion in the rum-running game, with the Sound seeing its share of dark schooners and boats sneaking in on moonlit nights. At the time, rum-running was a remarkably profitable game on the Cape—one that still echoes among residents today.
 
A native of Cape Cod, George Michelsen Foy is the author of thirteen novels, including The Last Green Light (just released last month). His non-fiction works have been published in Harper’s, Rolling Stone, The New York Times, Men's Journal, and Slate. His latest non-fiction book was Run the Storm (2018). Others include Finding North: How Navigation Makes Us Human and Zero Decibels: The Search for Absolute Silence. As a kid, the George grew up with a man from Osterville who worked for his grandfather and smuggled hootch onto the Cape in a converted catboat. As a teenager, George was friends with a man who managed a rum depot for bootleggers and still ran it as a bar into the 1970s.

At various times in his career, George has worked as a factory-hand, agricultural laborer, commercial fisherman, and as chief cream-pastry transporter for a cakes factory in West London. He was educated at the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics and Political Science, and Bennington College. A former officer on British coastal freighters, he teaches creative writing at New York University, and holds a US Coast Guard coastal captain’s license.

“[Foy is] a storyteller who, like Conrad, can compress into a tale you can’t put down all the complexities of a time and place.” ­–– Nobel prize-winner Doris Lessing, on his novel To Sleep with Ghosts
 
“A fine, rich bouillabaisse of a book” –– New York Times Book Review (on his novel Asia Rip)
 
“Foy's prose is both potent and elegant” –– Booklist (of Hard Bottom)