Debby Applegate
Auteur de The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
A propos de l'auteur
Crédit image: Courtesy of the Pulitzer Prizes.
Œuvres de Debby Applegate
Étiqueté
Partage des connaissances
- Nom canonique
- Applegate, Debby
- Date de naissance
- 1968
- Sexe
- female
- Nationalité
- USA
- Lieu de naissance
- Eugene, Oregon, USA
- Lieux de résidence
- Clackamas, Oregon, USA
New Haven, Connecticut, USA - Études
- Amherst College (B.A. | American Studies | 1989 | summa cum laude)
Yale University (Ph.D. | American Studies | 1998) - Professions
- writing teacher
- Relations
- Tulgan, Bruce (husband)
- Organisations
- New Haven Review
Yale Summer Cabaret
Friends of the Amherst College Library
Marymount Manhattan College - Prix et distinctions
- Honorary Doctorate (Letters, Westfield State College, 2008)
- Agent
- Susan Rabiner Literary Agency, New York
Membres
Critiques
Listes
Prix et récompenses
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Auteurs associés
Statistiques
- Œuvres
- 2
- Membres
- 511
- Popularité
- #48,532
- Évaluation
- 4.0
- Critiques
- 15
- ISBN
- 10
But instead of starting with this book I circled around and read first her Pulitzer Prize-winning work of a few years earlier: The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher.
It took me quite a while to figure out why Madam was a fitting coda to the biography of Beecher, one of America’s first celebrities of the modern era.
“Americans have little appetite for examining the dreary mechanics behind the spectacle of our dreams” Applegate laments in the closing paragraphs of Madam.
This seemed to me pretty much what Applegate was doing in the first biography.
In telling this story she was telling a rather unvarnished version of the powers behind New York in a way, I think, that befits the tradition Robert Caro started with The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York.
Who after all are the heroes of American myth: gangsters like Dutch Shultz and Al Capone, the sturdy men in blue and the courts of Law and Order, Broadway and Wall Street.
Polly Adler, a 12-year-old Jewish immigrant from Belarus, was corrupted at every stage of the way by the free-for-all big city. When it came time to pay her dues, it usually meant big-time protection payments to lawyers and district attorneys, to judges and cops and vice squad detectives.
This began with the puritanical inclinations of the first Jewish relatives who take her in once she landed in America. It was cultivated by the lures to a single and poor young woman promised by the rides of Coney island and the early dance halls of Brooklyn and Queens, and solidified by a rape, abortion, and later an intoxication by men wielding power.
The usual spin was that Polly “bribed” the cops. The reality was that Polly was fitting in with a tradition of corruption that originated with the Democratic machine of Tammany Hall.
The crooks were every bit the tool of the politicians. Poverty and the grinding wheels of American style capitalism kept everybody in line.
It was this system that made it easy for hoodlums to beat the crap out of Polly’s “girls” when they so wished, and it was the same system that kept quiet Franklin Roosevelt’s preference for felatio from prostitutes when he was Tammany Hall’s favourite choice for the White House.
And I couldn’t help but share Polly’s terror when one of New York’s most brutal and unpredictable killers, Arthur Simon Flegenheimer, a.k.a. Dutch Shultz, suddenly decided to make Polly’s apartment his operations base during a bloody gangland war.
Applegate deftly highlights Polly’s disgust for the lure of narcotics and alcohol and their affects on the johns and her employees, things for which Polly had a ringside seat at the beginning of her long association with prostitution.
These are also part and parcel of “the dreary mechanics” of the American way and American style celebrity.… (plus d'informations)