Falling in love with a subject
Debby Applegate, who last week won a Pulitzer for "The Most Famous Man in America,'' her biography of Henry Ward Beecher, spoke wistfully in Cambridge last night about the man who has captivated her imagination for 20 years.
When asked what her next book might be, she acknowledged how tough it might be to find a character as quirky, fiery, and fascinating as Beecher. "You have to fall in love with a character'' if you're going to write a biography, she said. "If you've had a really good 'boyfriend,' it's even harder to find the next one."
(Applegate, in town to accept an award from the Unitarian Universalist Association, noted tht Beecher's father, Lyman, despised Unitarians and once said that he could rout the Unitarians out of Boston "roots and all'' in two years.)
After making Beecher the subject of her senior thesis at Amherst College and her doctoral dissertation at Yale, Applegate signed a contract in 1998 to write a book about him. She expected it to take a year and a half.
Needless to say, searching for a "smoking gun'' that would settle the question of whether Beecher, a minister, did in fact have an affair with a parishioner took a lot longer than she expected.
When the contract was signed, Doubleday, the publisher, thought the timing of Applegate's book would be perfect, what with the Clinton-Lewinsky affair in the news and all. She missed that news cycle but the affairs keep coming.
