Tuesday, January 10 at 2:00 P.M.
Debby Applegate, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author Presents
Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age
A Jewish Book Council Author Talk on Zoom and live broadcast and live streamed on FCTV (Falmouth Community Television). https://fctv.org/
Register here for Zoom, where you can participate in the Q & A:
https://us02web.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEpcemgrz0rG9ed2J3tN-WW5oJF7AXXyDGv
The compulsively readable and sometimes jaw-dropping story of the life of a notorious madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star and Cafe Society swell worth knowing, and who as much as any single figure helped make the twenties roar—from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America.
"A fast-paced tale of … Polly’s many court battles, newspaper headlines, mobster dealings and society gossip…. A breathless tale told through extraordinary research.” —The New York Times Book Review
From Debby Applegate's website: https://debbyapplegate.com/
Meet the real-life figure to rival the fictional Great Gatsby. From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Most Famous Man in America, the compulsively readable and sometimes jaw-dropping life of the notorious madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star and Cafe Society swell worth knowing, and who as much as any single figure helped make the twenties roar
Simply put: Everybody came to Polly’s. Pearl “Polly” Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were key gathering places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld–and had a good time doing it. As a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, Polly Adler’s life is a classic American story of success and assimilation that starts like a novel by Henry Roth and then turns into a glittering real-life tale straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She declared her ambition to be “the best goddam madam in all America” and succeeded wildly. Debby Applegate uses Polly’s story as the key to unpacking just what made the 1920s the appallingly corrupt yet glamorous and transformational era that it was and how the collision between high and low is the unique ingredient that fuels American culture.
About Debby Applegate:
Born in Eugene, Oregon on February the 1st, 1968, Debbie Applegate 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 for Autobiography. She was raised with her mother, who was a Mormon New Thought minister and an Irish Catholic father. Graduating summa cum laude in 1989 and becoming a Sterling Fellow at Yale University, she then earned a Ph.D. in American studies. She is married to business writer Bruce Tulgen and currently living in New Haven Connecticut.