DEBBY APPLEGATE
When: Thursday, April 16, 2009
Where: Scanlon Banquet Hall
Time: 6:00 pm Reception / 7:00 pm Program

Debby Applegate has spent 20 years researching and writing about Henry Ward Beecher. She first discovered Beecher as an undergraduate in the college archives at Amherst College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1989. She continued her work on Beecher while a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1998. Her research for the book spanned the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, and took her to scores of historical archives and scholarly libraries across the country, from country athenaeums to ivy covered towers to the damp basements of elderly great-grandchildren.

Her writing has won her numerous prizes and fellowships, has appeared in publications from the Journal of American History to The New York Times and she has taught at Yale and Wesleyan Universities. A sample of her syllabi can be found in the American Studies Syllabus Library online.

She has just been named a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle award for “The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.”