In 2009, with fellow biographers Nigel Hamilton, James McGrath Morris, and Pulitzer-prize winner Debby Applegate, Shields co-founded Biographers International Organization (BIO), a non-profit organization founded to promote the art and craft of biography, and to further the professional interests of its practitioners.
As of 2011, Applegate is working on a biography of Polly Adler, New York City's notorious Prohibition-era brothel-keeper whose 1953 memoir A House is Not a Home became a New York Times Bestseller and a 1963 film starring Shelley Winters.
Debby Applegate described the biography as "a terrific book about the unlikely couple who touched off the sexual revolution. More than a biography, this is an intimate history of sex in the twentieth century."
The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher is a 2006 biography of the 19th-century American minister Henry Ward Beecher, written by Debby Applegate and published by Doubleday.
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