Debby Applegate’s first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, was the product of 20 years of research. It won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. It was widely acclaimed as one of the best books of 2006.
Debby holds degrees from Amherst and Yale and has taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. She currently teaches a master class on writing biography and memoir at the Writing Center at Marymount Manhattan College in New York. She lives in New Haven with her husband, the business writer Bruce Tulgan, and serves on the governing boards of the New Haven Review, the Yale Summer Cabaret and the Friends of the Amherst College Library. Debby is currently researching a cultural biography of Polly Adler, Manhattan's most infamous madam from the 1920s through the 1940s, and whose 1953 autobiography, A House is Not a Home, became a best-selling book and a Hollywood film starring Shelley Winters.
Adam Braver is the author of Mr. Lincoln’s Wars, Divine Sarah, Crows Over the Wheatfield, and November 22, 1963. His books have been selected for the Barnes and Noble Discover New Writers program, Border’s Original Voices series, the IndieNext list, and twice for the Book Sense list; and have been translated into Italian, Japanese, and French. His work has appeared in journals such as Daedalus, Ontario Review, Cimarron Review, Water-Stone Review, Harvard Review, Tin House, West Branch, and Post Road. He is on the faculty and writer-in-residence at Roger Williams University in Bristol, RI. He also teaches in the Stonecoast MFA, and at the NY State Summer Writers Institute.
