The Lighthouse on Devils Island

One miserable spring night, a tired, bitter, despairing old lighthouse keeper prepares to jump off the top of Lake Superior's Devils Island Lighthouse. It seems the end for Owen McClatchy, but it's the beginning, during a wondrous summer of 1928. The instrument of McClatchy's redemption is most unexpected: new first assistant keeper Sam Brown and his family, just up from St. Louis. McClatchy sees Brown as incompetent, his wife as impertinent and his two kids as the devil underfoot. But by summer's end, the Browns help McClatchy realize he hasn't wasted his life on a lighthouse and enable him to jump into whatever life has for him. Based on the real Devils Island Lighthouse in Lake Superior’s Apostle Islands archipelago, The Lighthouse on Devils Island is full of carefully-researched details about the drudgery, loneliness, beauty and heroism of a time and place when everything depended on keeping the light burning.

St. Louis-based freelance writer and author Jim Merkel fell in love with lighthouses in 1995, when he and his wife, Lorraine, made the first of numerous visits to the Apostle Islands. He started writing The Lighthouse on Devils Island around 1997 and basically finished it in 2003. The book stayed unread in a computer file until 2015, when he tweaked the manuscript and self-published it. In 2001, he published Majestic Lights: The Apostle Islands Lighthouses, a nonfiction book about the lighthouses of the Apostle Islands. He is the author of three books published by the traditional royalty publisher Reedy Press, Beer, Brats, and Baseball: St. Louis Germans; and Hoosiers and Scrubby Dutch: St. Louis's South Side; and The Making of an Icon: The Dreamers, The Schemers, and the Hard Hats Who Built the Gateway Arch. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch named The Making of an Icon one of the fifty best books of 2014. Merkel has made his living as a journalist since he graduated from the University of Missouri School of Journalism in 1973. He writes for several St. Louis outlets, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and its website, stltoday.com.