PS General Slocum - in Popular Culture

In Popular Culture

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• 1922 – There are a couple of references to the disaster in James Joyce's Ulysses, the events of which take place on the following day (June 16, 1904).
• 1939 – Journalist Nat Ferber's autobiography, "I found out: a confidential chronicle of the twenties," begins with his reporting on the General Slocum tragedy.
• 1996 – Eric Blau's novel The Hero of the Slocum Disaster is based on the disaster; it as later adapted by Patrick Tull and Emily King into a one man play
• 2000 – The story of the General Slocum was described as an "Avoidable Catastrophe" in Bob Fenster's book, Duh! The Stupid History of the Human Race, in Part One, which discusses stories involving stupidity.
• 2003 – The disaster is featured in one of the chapters of author Clive Cussler's novel The Sea Hunters 2 when he finds the wreckage of the barge Maryland, which was what the Slocum was converted to after it was salvaged.
• 2004 – The 2005 Hugo Award-nominated novella "Time Ablaze" by Michael A. Burstein (Analog, June 2004) concerns a time traveler who comes to record the disaster. The story was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the disaster.
• 2006 – The General Slocum disaster is at the center of the novel The Unresolved, by T.K. Welsh.
• 2008 – The General Slocum disaster plays a prominent role in Richard Crabbe's novel Hell's Gate
• 2009 – The General Slocum tragedy is described in detail in Glenn Stout's 2009 biography of Gertrude Ederle, Young Woman and the Sea. Stout uses the incident, in which many women and young children drowned, to help explain the history of how women, including Ederle, were afforded opportunities to learn to swim during the early part of the century.
• 2010-2012 – The disaster plays a prominent role in the novels In the Shadow of Gotham (2010) and Secret of the White Rose (2012) by Stefanie Pintoff.
• 2011 – The sinking and the spirits of the dead near the site of the sinking at the Hell Gate Bridge are a major plot line in the supernatural novel Dead Waters by Anton Strout.

Film, television, music

• 1904 – The American composer Charles Ives (1874–1954) wrote a tone poem The General Slocum, a musical portrait of the disaster.
• 1915 – Regeneration is an early gangster film directed by Raoul Walsh and produced by William Fox. The film was lost until the 1970s. Regeneration has a lengthy scene in which an excursion picnic ship burns in dramatic fashion while passengers jump overboard, an obvious reference to the General Slocum disaster. Walsh shot the scene in New York not too far from where the real disaster occurred.
• 1934 – The first scenes of the film Manhattan Melodrama recreate the disaster.
• 1998 – German Television produced and showed an hour-long documentary The Slocum is on Fire! by Christian Baudissin about the disaster and its impact on the German community of New York.
• 2001 – A description of the disaster and the following events in relation to September 11 is given in Act II by David Rakoff in Episode 194: Before and After of the radio program This American Life.
• 2002 – The General Slocum disaster was featured in the documentary My Father's Gun