Deborah Lincoln's Reviews > The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher

Pulitzer-Prize-winning biography of Henry Ward Beecher. Think a combination of Billy Graham and Donald Trump. What charisma can do: the man charms, seduces, beds his friends’ wives and his friends grovel, even when they hate him. Oh, and throw in the sordid fascination of the OJ trial: there were (so it is claimed) more stories in the newspapers of the day about the Beecher adultery trial than there had been about the Civil War during its four years. This is a snapshot of the Gilded Age: sex, money, women as objects, free love, excess, suffragists, Mark Twain, politics, miserable wives and dying children, preachers living in mansions — it’s all here.