The Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition and Labyrinth Books invite you to discuss and celebrate the publication of The Most Famous Man in America with author Debby Applegate. A reception and book signing will follow the discussion.

The charismatic Beecher found international fame by preaching a New Testament–based gospel of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. By the 1850s, his spectacular sermons had made him New York’s number one tourist attraction.

Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era—among them the antislavery and women’s suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended—and sometimes parodied—him. And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the “Gospel of Love” seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of “criminal conversation” in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War. Beecher survived, but his reputation and his causes—from women’s rights to progressive evangelicalism—suffered devastating setbacks that echo to this day.

Featuring the page-turning suspense of a novel and dramatic new historical evidence, Debby Applegate has written the definitive biography of this captivating, mercurial, and sometimes infuriating figure. In our own time, when religion and politics are again colliding and adultery in high places still commands headlines, Beecher’s story sheds new light on the culture and conflicts of contemporary America.

“Historian Debby Applegate’s The Most Famous Man in America is a brilliantly written, judicious, monumental biography of Henry Ward Beecher. The amount of new research material she unearthed is stunning. Chalk it up as a classic.”— Douglas Brinkley

Debby Applegate is a summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College and was a Sterling Fellow at Yale University, where she received her Ph.D. in American Studies. She has written for publications ranging from the Journal of American History to The New York Times, and has taught at Yale and Wesleyan universities.