Debby Applegate with Madam: The Biography of Polly Adler, Icon of the Jazz Age

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author comes a story of the Roaring Twenties and New York’s notorious Madam who played hostess to every gangster, politician, writer, sports star and Cafe Society swell worth knowing.

Pearl "Polly" Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels during the Jazz Age became gathering places for the culturati and celebrity elite, high society and underworld figures, alike. As a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, her life is a classic American story of success and assimilation. Polly declared her ambition to be "the best goddam madam in all America" and succeeded wildly. Debby Applegate uses her story as the key to unpacking just what made the 1920s such a corrupt yet glamorous and transformational era. She shows how the collision between high and low was—and is—the unique ingredient that fuels American culture.

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