Debby Applegate is a historian whose first book, The Most Famous
Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, won the 2007
Pulitzer Prize for biography and was a finalist for the Los Angeles
Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for
biography. She is a graduate of Amherst College and was a Sterling
Fellow in American Studies at Yale University where she received
her Ph.D. and lives in New Haven, Connecticut with her husband, the
management writer Bruce Tulgan.
“Pearl to Polly, shtetl child to savvy New Yorker, Brooklyn corset
factory girl to Manhattan’s most notorious brothel owner: Madam:
The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age, by the Pulitzer
Prize-winning biographer Debby Applegate, tells a fast-paced tale
of radical, willful transformation. . .Replete with accounts of
Polly’s many court battles, newspaper headlines, mobster dealings
and society gossip, Madam is a breathless tale told through
extraordinary research.” --The New York Times Book Review
"A biography that is also a story of America bursting into the
modern age, with new roles for women, new rules for couples, and
parties that flowed into rooms down the hall.” --CBS Sunday
Morning
“Some of Manhattan’s most colorful denizens — from writers and pols
to corrupt cops and mobsters — traipsed through the Depression-era
brothels run by Polly Adler, the savvy subject of this exuberant
history by a Pulitzer-winning biographer. . .‘Applegate, armed with
formidable skills, may be the biographer who can come closest to
revealing her.’ ” --The New York Times Editors' Choice, Best Books
of 2021
“Madam, Debby Applegate’s tour de force about Jazz Age icon Polly
Adler, will seize you by the lapels, buy you a drink, and keep you
reading until the very last page. Applegate’s brilliant research
and cinematic prose made me feel I was peering over Adler’s
shoulder, watching her drift through the parlor of her brownstone
establishment, wisecracking with the Mob and paying off the cops.
Madam is a judicious exploration of the dark side of the American
Dream, and Applegate is a lively and knowledgeable guide. A treat
for fiction and nonfiction fans alike." --Abbott Kahler, New York
Times bestselling author (as Karen Abbott) of The Ghosts of Eden
Park
“A vividly detailed social history of Manhattan’s netherworld,
peopled by gangsters and bootleggers, bookies and racketeers,
corrupt policemen and politicians, and a seemingly endless stream
of ‘working girls.’. . . An animated, entertaining history.”
--Kirkus Reviews
“In effervescent writing, Applegate chronicles how Adler, after
escaping anti-Semitic Russia for New York City in 1913, survived
judgmental relatives, sweatshop work, and rape before stumbling
into a job procuring women for Nick Montana, ‘the Henry Ford of the
sex trade’. . .The result is a rollicking examination of one of the
country’s most sensational hostesses.” --Publishers Weekly, starred
review
“‘[Polly Adler’s] wit and charm made her America's most famous
queen of vice in the Roaring Twenties—and roar they do in Debby
Applegate's fascinating new biography. . .Madam rollicks like no
biography has rollicked before.” --T.J. Stiles, author of the
Pulitzer Prize-winning The First Tycoon and Custer’s Trials
“Sometimes notoriety has it all over fame. I lost count of the
aliases, the addresses, and the arrests. You can’t lose sight of
Polly Adler: Whether charming Robert Benchley, discussing
abortionists with Tallulah Bankhead, or comping Desi Arnaz, she
nearly leaps—116 pounds of hard-boiled chutzpah— from these pages.
Adler knew about first-class treatment and gets it in this splendid
biography, rich with color, exhaustively researched, and bursting
with energy.” --Stacy Schiff, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The
Witches and Cleopatra
“In a time when young women were victimized at every turn, Polly
Adler told herself she was improving their odds -- and she knew she
was improving her own. At last, America’s most
notorious madam has found the hard-boiled biographer she
deserves. Brilliant, witty, meticulously researched, Debby
Applegate’s Madam is a delicious, beautifully written ride through
the nocturnal netherworld of jazz-age Manhattan, right into the
heart of what we still call, despite everything, the American
dream.” --Tom Reiss, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Black
Count and The Orientalist
“Madam is an astonishing book, a stunning achievement by Debby
Applegate who takes the life of Polly Adler, a nice Jewish girl
from the Pale of Russia, and uses it to craft a wholly new history
of New York in the Jazz Age. . .Applegate names the names, but her
thoughtful narrative is not mere exposé but serious history,
examining the “dreary mechanics” of the American Dream. Applegate’s
Madam is a formidable work in both scholarship and just good
writing.” --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian and author
of The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter
“I am in awe. With an extraordinary ear for voice and
with deep and impeccable research, Debby Applegate has written a
scintillating account of the rise (or was it the fall?) of the
preeminent bordello keeper of New York’s Jazz Age, Polly Adler. .
.Madam is an exquisitely crafted, morally inverted rags-to-riches
story of an ambitious but impoverished immigrant woman who saw only
one path to the top and resolutely followed it. . .Applegate brings
us in touch with aspects of human nature that, for good
or ill, never seem to change. Polly Adler’s early acquaintances
were fond of saying, “When a girl falls, she always lands on her
back.” Debby Applegate’s Madam not only lands on its feet; it
sticks the landing.” --John Matteson, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
of Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her
Father
“Impeccably researched, breathlessly written and full-time
fun, Madam tells of the story of a tough little girl from
Russia who rises in 1920s New York from prostitution to power in
the world’s oldest profession. Madam is a marvelous tableau of
characters, from regulars and hop heads to millionaires in search
of their next girl.” --Michael Shnayerson, author of Bugsy Siegel:
The Dark Side of the American Dream
“What was a nice girl from an East European shetl doing running an
elite Manhattan bordello for more than three decades?
Read this book, a stunning blend of scholarship and non-stop sex,
to find out!” --William Taubman, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of
Khrushchev: The Man and His Era and Gorbachev: His Life and
Times
"In Madam, Debby Applegate transports us to the
much-mythologized but still unknown world of New York's illicit
Jazz-Age sex trade. One part Horatio Alger tale, one part feminist
anthem, one part gangster drama, the biography of famed madam Polly
Adler straddles the boundaries of legal and illegal, political and
personal. In Applegate's hands, it is one swell party."
--Beverly Gage, author of The Day Wall Street Exploded
"Madam tells a story that is larger than just one life - it is a
cultural history of America in the first half of the twentieth
century, a country that, like Polly Adler, was overflowing with
ambition. . . .Debby Applegate has found the perfect
American avatar in Polly Adler, and with Madam, she has more than
met the challenge of telling the tale. Madam is a riot.” --David
Hill, author of The Vapors: A Southern Family, the New York Mob,
and the Rise and Fall of Hot Springs, America’s Forgotten
Capital of Vice
"Debby Applegate infuses her profile of the (in)famous Jazz Age
madam Polly Adler with a precision and vitality that resurrect the
Manhattan of a century ago in all its manic glory. . .Applegate
convincingly evokes the atmosphere and complexities of wildly
diverse milieus from muddy shtetls to the raucous pleasures of
Coney Island. . .Through her dynamic prose, Applegate accomplishes
the most difficult task facing a historian--bringing the past close
without ever relinquishing its strange wonder." --Robert Anasi,
author of The Last Bohemia and The Gloves
“[Madam] is. . .a hugely digressive book in the best possible way:
You meet a lot of gangsters and high rollers in Adler’s New York,
and they cross paths with novelists, entertainers, professional
boxers, and now and then a mayor or a Rockefeller.” --Curbed
“Applegate’s well written and exhaustively researched biography of
Polly Adler offers unique insight into a remarkable immigrant as
well as the Roaring ’20s.” --The New York Journal of Books
“A funny, fascinating look at a madam who set out to become the
‘best goddamn Madam in all America.’ ” --The New York Post
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