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Evening with Henry and Harriet Beecher
December 6, 2007
Philip McFarland historian
Debby Applegate writer

Philip McFarland and Debby Applegate discuss the life of abolitionist writer Harriet Beecher Stowe, and that of her brother, the influential preacher Henry Ward Beecher.

Historian Philip McFarland's Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe follows the Reverend Lyman Beecher, a prominent theologian, as he moves his family west to Cincinnati, then a frontier boomtown. More than the portrait of a family and its most famous daughter, Loves of Harriet Beecher Stowe is a detailed rendering of America in the midst of a social and demographic explosion.

Debby Applegate's The Most Famous Man in America describes how, in the 1850s, Henry Ward Beecher's spectacular sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights had made him so wildly popular that the ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn were dubbed 'Beecher Boats'. However, It all fell apart in 1872, when an accusation that Beecher had been having an affair with a parishioner led to a salacious trial that garnered more newspaper headlines than the Civil War.

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Image of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher
Author: Debby Applegate
Publisher: Three Leaves (2007)
Binding: Paperback, 560 pages
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