New York City, the Roaring Twenties and a Madam for the Powerful

0:Two Pulitzer Prize winning authors meet for an illustrated presentation and discussion of the latest work from historian Debby Applegate, “Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age.” It's the story of a notorious madam who played hostess to gangsters, politicians, writers, sports stars and Cafe Society swells. As much as any single figure at that time, Pearl "Polly" Adler helped make the twenties roar.

Debby Applegate is a historian and biographer based in New Haven, CT. Her 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 Times Book Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for biography.

Joining Applegate is John Matteson, a Distinguished Professor of English at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the author of “A Worse Place Than Hell: How the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg Changed a Nation”; “The Lives of Margaret Fuller,” and “Eden’s Outcasts,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in biography.

----- Contents of the video ----
0:00:00 - Intro
0:02:10 - Speakers' Bio
0:05:07 - Who Was Polly Adler?
0:08:35 - Her Childhood
0:12:15 - Transition to Madam
0:22:14 - Her Exit Plan
0:25:50 - What Research For Such a Book?
0:31:09 - Personalities of the Underworld
0:34:30 - Polly's Background - Family's reactions
0:37:21 - Be Somebody
0:47:02 - Polly's Love Life
0:56:06 - Author Reads

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