Debby Applegate spent 20 years researching and writing about Henry Ward Beecher. She first discovered Beecher as an undergraduate in the college archives at Amherst College, where she graduated summa cum laude in 1989. She continued her work on Beecher while a Sterling Fellow in American Studies at Yale, where she earned her Ph.D. in 1998. Her research for the book spanned the American Revolution to the Gilded Age, and took her to scores of historical archives and scholarly libraries across the country, from tiny country libraries to ivy-league institutions to the damp basements of elderly Beecher descendents. The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher won the 2007 Pulitzer Prize in Biography, as well as many other awards and honors, and was chosen as one of the top books of 2006 by an array of critics.