Debby Applegate

Debby Applegate
Debby Applegate in 2006. Photo by Carolyn A. Martin.
Born	1968
Occupation	historian
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Amherst College, Yale University
Genre	biography
Notable works	The Most Famous Man in America (2006)
Spouse	Bruce Tulgan

Debby Applegate (born 1968) is an American historian and biographer. She is the author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1968, Applegate attended Amherst College as an undergraduate, where she began a two-decade fascination with famous alumnus Henry Ward Beecher, a 19th-century abolitionist minister who was later the subject of a widely publicized sex scandal. She made Beecher the subject of her dissertation in American Studies at Yale, where she received a Ph.D. in 1998. After several more years of research, Applegate published The Most Famous Man in America, which was praised by critics and awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She has announced that her second book will be a biography of New York City brothel-keeper Polly Adler.

Biography

Born in Eugene, Oregon, Applegate grew up in Clackamas, Oregon, graduating from Clackamas High School in 1985. She was raised in what she described as an "unusual religious environment": her mother, from a Mormon family, became a New Thought minister, while her father was an Irish Catholic. She graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1989 and was a Sterling Fellow at Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1998.

Applegate has taught at Yale, Wesleyan University, and Marymount Manhattan College. Her contributions have appeared in The Journal of American History and The New York Times.

Applegate was a founding member of Biographers International Organization (BIO), and served as its interim president in 2009. She currently serves as the Chair of BIO's Advisory Committee.

She is married to Bruce Tulgan, a business writer whose books include It's Okay To Be The Boss. They live in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Most Famous Man in America

Main article: The Most Famous Man in America

As an undergraduate student worker at Amherst College, Applegate was assigned to assemble an exhibit on a famous alumnus and selected Henry Ward Beecher, a 19th-century minister known for his abolitionist preaching and widely publicized sex scandal. Applegate described him as " unlike any religious figure I’d ever seen. I loved his very modern sense of humor, his irreverence, and his joyful, ecumenical approach to religion and life in general." She later made him the subject of her undergraduate senior thesis and her PhD dissertation at Yale University. After graduation, Applegate signed a publishing contract to write a biography of Beecher.

Applegate's initial chapters were written in what she considered an overly academic voice, so to write a biography with popular appeal, she studied fiction writing, including techniques for suspense and pornographic writing. She structured the resulting book as a psychological thriller.

Though she had originally hoped to publish the book during the 1998 Lewinsky scandal, in which US President Bill Clinton was discovered to have had a sexual relationship with a White House intern, the research took several years longer than she had initially planned. The book was finally released in 2006 by Doubleday.

Reception

The Most Famous Man in America was sold well and was generally praised by critics. NPR selected it as one of the year's best nonfiction books, stating that the book "convinces readers of the truth of that swaggering title". Kirkus Reviews called it a "beautifully written biography of America's one best-known preacher ... An exceptionally thorough and thoughtful account of a spectacular career that helped shape and reflect national preoccupations before, during and after the Civil War." Publishers Weekly wrote that "this assessment of Beecher is judicious and critical. Applegate gives an insightful account." In a review for The Boston Globe, Katherine A. Powers called the book a "fantastic story with novelistic flair and penetration into the ever-changing motives and expediencies of its many actors." Michael Kazin, reviewing the book for The New York Times, stated that Applegate's writing occasionally "loses its force in a thicket of personal details", but concluded that the book is "a biography worthy of its subject".

On April 16, 2007, the book was announced as the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography. Applegate said of her win, "Half of it is just good luck ... Had it come out four years ago, I don't think the climate was ready for it. The religious right intersection with politics is very important now."

Madam: The Notorious Life and Times of Polly Adler

As of 2011, Applegate was working on a biography of Polly Adler, New York City's notorious Prohibition-era brothel-keeper whose 1953 memoir A House is Not a Home became a New York Times Bestseller and a 1963 film starring Shelley Winters. The decision to write the book came after a year of research into 1920s New York City cultural history, during which Applegate discovered Adler's memoir and grew fascinated by it. Applegate's book is to be titled Madam: The Notorious Life and Times of Polly Adler and will be published by Doubleday.

External links

• The Most Famous Man in America (official website)