The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

by Debby Applegate

A Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s charismatic preacher brother, Henry, who became internationally famous for his spectacular sermons on the “gospel of love”—before a sex scandal brought everything tumbling down. As Applegate writes, “what Beecher brought to American culture in an era of bewildering change and fratricidal war was unconditional love so deep and so wide that the entire country could feel his warmth, like it or not.”