Publisher's Synopsis
A Southern Madam and Her Man is the story of twopeople who, despite their conventional upbringings,thrived in the raucous decade known as the Gay Nineties, orAmerica's decadent version of the Gilded Age. The daughterof a wagonmaker, Susie Tillett was raised amid the horse andhemp farms of the Kentucky Bluegrass; Arthur Jack was theoldest son and heir of a successful Atlanta merchant. By thetime they met in 1892, when they both were in their earlythirties, Susie had become the successful madam of popular"parlor houses" (up-scale brothels) in Lexington, Kentucky,and Chattanooga, Tennessee. Arthur had left a wife and achild in Atlanta to become a saloonist, gambler, horse-trader,and publicly acclaimed "dashing Don Juan" about town.Uncovered during a decade of unflinching research andtold here for the first time by their great-grandson, the authorand historian David Dearinger, this is a tale of conventionalpeople making unusual and even socially suspect choicessimply, in the end, to do the best they could.
