The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

Debby Applegate is an American historian and biographer born in Eugene, Oregon, who graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1989 and earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from Yale University. Amherst.edu Her first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (2006), won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award; her second, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age (2021), followed after extensive archival research.