Sex, Politics, and Religion, Or, How I Turned My Undergraduate Thesis into a Pulitzer Prize Winning Biography
Debby Applegate, recipient of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for her book The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher (Doubleday, 2006), discusses Beecher and tells the story of turning her undergraduate research into an award-winning book. She discovered Beecher, the 19th-century preacher whom she characterizes as a “real-life Forrest Gump,” when she was an undergraduate at Amherst College. Subsequently, she made him the subject of her dissertation at Yale, where she earned a Ph.D. in 1998. She spent nearly a decade reworking her thesis into the book named a “Notable Book of the Year” in 2006 by the New York Times.
Presenter(s): Debby Applegate
Date: November 29, 2007
Location: Gasson 305
Sponsor(s): American Studies Program; History Department; Religion and the Arts; Theology Department; College of Arts and Sciences
URL: http://frontrow.bc.edu/program/applegate/
The information on this page is accurate as of November 2007