Debby Applegate

Debby Applegate
Debby Applegate in 2006. Photo by Carolyn A. Martin.
Born	(1968-02-01) February 1, 1968 (age 48) Eugene, Oregon, U.S.
Occupation	Historian
Nationality	American
Alma mater	Amherst College Yale University
Genre	Biography
Notable works	The Most Famous Man in America (2006)
Spouse	Bruce Tulgan

Debby Applegate (born February 1, 1968) is an American historian and biographer. She is the author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, for which she won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography.

Born in Eugene, Oregon in 1968, Applegate attended Amherst College as an undergraduate, where she began a two-decade fascination with famous alumnus Henry Ward Beecher, a 19th-century abolitionist minister who was later the subject of a widely publicized sex scandal. She made Beecher the subject of her dissertation in American Studies at Yale, where she received a Ph.D. in 1998. After several more years of research, Applegate published The Most Famous Man in America, which was praised by critics and awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She has announced that her second book will be a biography of New York City brothel-keeper Polly Adler.

Born in Eugene, Oregon, Applegate grew up in Clackamas, Oregon, graduating from Clackamas High School in 1985. She was raised in what she described as an "unusual religious environment": her mother, from a Mormon family, became a New Thought minister, while her father was an Irish Catholic. She graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College in 1989 and was a Sterling Fellow at Yale University, where she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies in 1998.

Applegate has taught at Yale, Wesleyan University, and Marymount Manhattan College. Her contributions have appeared in The Journal of American History and The New York Times.