Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age

Debby Applegate is a historian whose first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography. She is a graduate of Amherst College and was a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale University where she received her Ph.D. and lives in New Haven, Connecticut with her husband, the management writer Bruce Tulgan.