If you subscribe to our monthly newsletter, then you and I have probably met... And if we've met, I've probably told you about the book my wife has been writing for the last twenty years... And there is a very good chance that you were kind enough to say, "That's great. Please tell me when your wife's book finally comes out..." Well, I hope you'll forgive me, but this opportunity comes only once every twenty years (apparently). So we are devoting a special edition of the newsletter to announcing the release of...

The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, by Debby Applegate, will be published by Doubleday June 27, 2006 (which just so happens to be my birthday!). The book is a historical biography that reads like a novel about family, religion, slavery, freedom, war, politics, celebrity, sex and scandal. This is the riveting story of the person Abraham Lincoln called "the most influential man in America."

No one predicted success for Henry Ward Beecher at his birth in 1813. The blithe, boisterous son of the last great Puritan minister, he seemed destined to be overshadowed by his brilliant siblings--especially his sister, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who penned the century's bestselling book Uncle Tom's Cabin. But when pushed into the ministry, the charismatic Beecher found international fame by shedding his father's Old Testament--style fire-and-brimstone theology and instead preaching a New Testament–based gospel message of unconditional love and healing, becoming one of the founding fathers of modern American Christianity. By the 1850s, his spectacular sermons at Plymouth Church in Brooklyn Heights had made him New York's number one tourist attraction, so wildly popular that the ferries from Manhattan to Brooklyn were dubbed "Beecher Boats."

Beecher inserted himself into nearly every important drama of the era--among them the antislavery and women's suffrage movements, the rise of the entertainment industry and tabloid press, and controversies ranging from Darwinian evolution to presidential politics. He was notorious for his irreverent humor and melodramatic gestures, such as auctioning slaves to freedom in his pulpit and providing high-powered Sharps rifles--nicknamed "Beecher's Bibles"--to the "Free State" settlers seeking to free Kansas from the scourge of slavery. Thinkers such as Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, and Twain befriended, admired--and sometimes parodied--him.

And then it all fell apart. In 1872 Beecher was accused by feminist firebrand Victoria Woodhull of adultery with one of his most pious parishioners. Suddenly the "Gospel of Love" seemed to rationalize a life of lust. The cuckolded husband brought charges of "criminal conversation" in a salacious trial that became the most widely covered event of the century, garnering more newspaper headlines than the entire Civil War.

The book has already received rave advance reviews from Pulitzer Prize Winning biographers, historians, journalists, and book lovers... It looks like this might be a blockbuster. For more information check out Debby's website at www.themostfamousmaninamerica.com or www.henrywardbeecher.com.