Alain Guillot

Life, Leadership, and Money Matters

Debby Applegate

778 Debby Applegate: Polly Adler, the queen of prostitution in New York City in the 1920s

About Debby Applegate

Debby Applegate

Debby Applegate is a historian and biographer. Her first book, The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the Pulitzer Prize for biography in 2007 and was a finalist for the Los Angeles Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

Her book was named one of the best books of the year by the New York Times Book Review, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Washington Post, Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle and American Heritage Magazine

The Most Famous Man in America was an unconventional portrait of an unconventional minister and antislavery activist whose celebrity rivaled Ralph Waldo Emerson and Abraham Lincoln. With her second book, Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, she plunged from the world of virtue to the underbelly of vice. It took thirteen years of immersion in the archives to research and write and – to give fair warning to all readers — is much racier than the first.  

Born and raised to be a proud Oregonian, Debby moved back east to attend Amherst College, where she met her husband, the management writer and consultant Bruce Tulgan. She was a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale University, where she earned her Ph.D., and now lives in New Haven, Connecticut where she continues to haunt the stacks of the Yale Library. 

Debby is also the author of numerous book chapters and articles and has written for the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal among other publications.  She has taught at Yale University, Wesleyan University, and Marymount College; served on the boards of organizations including the Yale Summer Cabaret, the Harriet Beecher Stowe Center, and the New Haven Review, and is the chair of Biographers International Advisory Council.  She has spoken many times as a panelist, book club guest, and keynote presenter and is available for speaking engagements.

Where to find Debby Applegate

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

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

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.

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.

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Comments

2 responses to “778 Debby Applegate: Polly Adler, the queen of prostitution in New York City in the 1920s”

  1. Thanks so much, again, for the really fun discussion and for the honor of appearing on your podcast. Best of luck for 2022!

    1. Even if it takes 13 years, please get in touch with me when you publish your next book.
      Happy New Year. 🙂