Join us at 1 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 1 in the Great Room of the library to hear Fred Hill, discuss his new book, “Beyond the Tides,” a collection of works by Richard M. Hallet, author and first president of Boothbay Harbor Memorial Library.

Hallet, a long-time resident of Boothbay, passed up a career in law after graduation from Harvard Law School and became a popular writer in the first half of the 20th century often compared to Jack London and Joseph Conrad.

Before passing up a career in law for the writing life, Richard Matthews Hallet lived an exciting life of adventure, that included a stint as a police officer, and as a seaman aboard a schooner bound for Australia. He then trekked across that country and lived by his wits in England for a time before returning to the States. Later, he was a deck officer on warships convoying soldiers and horses across the Atlantic in World War I, and facing U-boat attacks.

Over his life, Hallet wrote many novels, an autobiography and more than 200 short stories that were published in the most widely read magazines of the day, including the Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, Atlantic, Collier's, Everybody's, and American Legion Monthly. The stories gathered here, published in the first half of the twentieth century, include vivid tales of the sea, both in the days of sail and in the midst of war, often built around ship-board tensions and tumult; and stories of Maine and New England and their small-town values and rivalries.

About the editor

Frederic B. Hill was a reporter, correspondent and editorial writer for The Baltimore Sun from 1965 to 1985, including tours in London and Paris, covering Europe and southern Africa. After two years as foreign affairs director for Sen. Charles McC. Mathias, Jr. (R-MD), he joined the State Department in 1986 and established the Office of Special Programs, which conducted policy planning exercises and roundtable discussions on political/military, economic, and global issues.

A native of Maine and graduate of Bowdoin College, he and his wife Marguerite live in Arrowsic, Maine and Baltimore, Maryland. He serves on the advisory board of Maine’s First Ship, a non-profit organization building a reconstruction of Virginia, one of the first ships built in America at Popham Beach in 1608. Like Hallet, Hill studied law (more briefly), but with Hallet's strong encouragement turned to a successful career in journalism, and travel and adventures throughout the world as a foreign correspondent, then director of wargaming exercises on national security issues in the U.S. Department of State and as an accomplished author. William Donnell Crooker, one of the principal figures in his “Ships, Swindlers, and Scalded Hogs,” (Down East Books, 2016), was his great-great grandfather.