Debby Applegate ’89

Evelyn Kramer Student Contributor, Amherst College

This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Amherst chapter and does not reflect the views of Her Campus.

Still deciding whether or not you should spend months sequestered in Frost, researching and writing a thesis? Could anything of lasting value really come of it? For one collegiate anyway, the final result was a Pulitzer Prize.

Debby Applegate grew up in Clackamas (try saying that three times fast), Oregon. She headed to Amherst in 1985. During her time here, she discovered her thesis subject, Henry Ward Beecher (himself an illustrious Amherst grad—see Campus Celebrity, October 3). Applegate graduated summa cum laude from Amherst in 1989. She continued to work on Beecher at Yale where she earned a Ph.D. in American Studies. After 20 years of labor, she completed his story, The Most Famous Man in America: the Biography of Henry Ward Beecher. The book not only yielded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography. It was also named one of the best books of 2006 by the New York Times Book Review, the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the San Francisco Chronicle. So what are you waiting for? Get to the library…

Evelyn Kramer

Amherst

Evelyn is the Editor-in-Chief of the Amherst branch of Her Campus. She was a features intern at Seventeen Magazine during the summer of 2011 and a features intern at Glamour Magazine during the summer of 2013. She is a French and English major in the class of 2014 at Amherst College. She is also on Amherst's varsity squash team. She is an aspiring travel writer/novelist, and loves running, ice cream, and Jane Austen.

Debby Applegate ’89

We wanna slide into your DMs