Can you win a Pulitzer after having failed your grad school exams? Apparently so. At least in the case of East Rock’s Debby Applegate (pictured), who won this year’s prize for The Most Famous Man in America, her biography of 19th-century preacher Henry Ward Beecher.
In the second edition of “Castaway,” the New Haven Independent’s podcast series, I along with sound guru Lee Faulkner interview Applegate, who shares her thoughts on history, New Haven, the publishing business — and her own rocky road through a Ph.D. program.
For Applegate, it all turned out okay. Her book won rave reviews across the country and has taught thousands of readers about Beecher, who was much more than the brother of the man who wrote Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Beecher was also, perhaps, the first American celebrity. Preaching at his church in Brooklyn — what we today would call a “megachurch” — Beecher grew famous as a man of the cloth, an opponent of slavery, and a womanizer.
Click here to listen to the interview.
Click here to listen to Episode One of “Castaway,” a talk with the president of the Church of Scientology. Click here to read a related article in The New York Times Magazine.)
Wonderful interview! An engaging biography of Beecher and an engaging biography of the author Applegate. Every PhD student and historian should download Mark's and Debbie's charming conversation to their ipods, and I'm ordering the book today. I laughed, I cried, it was better than Stanley Katz. (That's a bad SNL/legal historian joke).