1784599972     

Madam : the biography of Polly Adler, icon of the Jazz Age / Debby Applegate

Applegate, Debby [Verfasserin/Verfasser]

[Large print edition]

Waterville, Maine : Thorndike Press, 2022

969 Seiten : Illustrationen

Englisch

Includes bibliographical references

2204

978-1-4328-9808-3 (hardcover)

2021060211

OCoLC: 1345242181     

LS 48100      Ähnliche Literatur

HQ146.N7

306.74/2092

LOC-SH: Adler, Polly -- 1900-1962 ; Procuresses -- New York (State) -- New York -- Biography ; Prostitution -- New York (State) -- New York -- History -- 20th century

BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical ; BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Women

From a nobody to a legend -- Man plans, god laughs -- The jazz baby -- What's a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? -- Liquor and lust -- Thumbs up with the mob -- The double standard -- The party girl racket -- The underworld complex -- The Jewish jezebel -- The female Al Capone -- Café society -- The big shot -- Madam emeritus.

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"Applegate's tour de force about Jazz Age icon Polly Adler will seize you by the lapels, buy you a drink, and keep you reading until the very last page.... A treat for fiction and nonfiction fans alike." --Abbott Kahler, New York Times bestselling author (as Karen Abbott) of The Ghosts of Eden Park Simply put: Everybody came to Polly's. Pearl "Polly" Adler (1900-1962) was a diminutive dynamo whose Manhattan brothels in the Roaring Twenties became places not just for men to have the company of women but were key gathering places where the culturati and celebrity elite mingled with high society and with violent figures of the underworld--and had a good time doing it. As a Jewish immigrant from eastern Europe, Polly Adler's life is a classic American story of success and assimilation that starts like a novel by Henry Roth and then turns into a glittering real-life tale straight out of F. Scott Fitzgerald. She declared her ambition to be "the best goddam madam in all America" and succeeded wildly. Debby Applegate uses Polly's story as the key to unpacking just what made the 1920s the appallingly corrupt yet glamorous and transformational era that it was and how the collision between high and low is the unique ingredient that fuels American culture"--