Author Talk with Gioia Diliberto

A lively, illustrated talk guaranteed to change how you see Prohibition.

Set in the Jazz Age of roadsters, diamonds, and gin, Firebrands explores in novelistic detail the intertwined lives of four fascinating rebels who strove for power in the first years after women won the vote.

You’ll meet Ella Boole, the stern and ambitious leader of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, who fought fiercely to keep America Dry, and Mabel Walker Willebrandt, a young lawyer and the most powerful woman in the U.S. government, who was in charge of enforcing Prohibition. You’ll also meet silent film star Texas Guinan, who ran New York speakeasies
backed by the mob and showed that Prohibition was absurd and unenforceable. And you’ll get to know Pauline Sabin, a glamorous Manhattan aristocrat who belatedly recognized the cascading evil of Prohibition and mobilized the movement to kill it. Pauline and her followers, dubbed the “Sabines” by the press, battled the forces of Dry America across a teeming landscape of bootleggers, gangsters, federal agents, temperance fanatics, and politicians, many of them secret drunks. Her clash with Ella Boole and the other characters of Firebrands stands as the first exercise of women’s political power since the passage of the 19th Amendment. Their influence on the American political scene wouldn’t be equaled for decades.

Don’t miss this compelling look at the colorful characters and seismic events that defined an era and forever altered the American political landscape.

Gioia Diliberto is a Woodbury-based author of eight books, five nonfiction, three novels, and a play. Her new book, Firebrands: The Untold Story of Four Women Who Made and Unmade Prohibition, debuted in October of 2024. Books can be purchased at the Hickory Stick Bookshop.

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