A Southern Madam and Her Man is the story of two people who, despite their conventional upbringings, thrived in the raucous decade known as the Gay Nineties--America's decadent version of the Gilded Age.

A Southern Madam and Her Man is the story of two people who, despite their conventional upbringings, thrived in the raucous decade known as the Gay Nineties-- America's decadent version of the Gilded Age. The daughter of a wagonmaker, Susie Tillett was raised amid the horse and hemp farms of the Kentucky Bluegrass; Arthur Jack was the oldest son and heir of a successful Atlanta merchant. By the time they met in 1892, when they were in their early thirties, 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 a child in Atlanta to become a saloonist, gambler, horse-trader, and publicly acclaimed "dashing young Don Juan." Uncovered during a decade of unflinching research and told here for the first time by their great-grandson, the author and historian David Dearinger, this is a tale of conventional people making unusual and even socially suspect choices simply, in the end, to do the best they could.

Lavishly illustrated with over seventy vintage photographs, maps, and documentary images, A Southern Madam and Her Man includes extensive, documented lists of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century madams of Lexington and Chattanooga, extended annotations to the text, and a comprehensive index.

David Dearinger was born in Woodford County, Kentucky, where his ancestors settled in the late eighteenth century. After graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1972, he moved to New York City to work for TWA as one of the first men hired by the airline industry into the previously all-female ranks of flight attendants. In 1975, he was promoted to the position of Flight Service Manager. While continuing to fly both domestically and internationally, he began graduate work at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 1982, eventually earning an M.A. in American Studies and an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in art history. Dearinger subsequently taught art history in New York at Hunter College, Queens College, Brooklyn College, and, for over twenty-five years, at the State University of New York's F.I.T. in Manhattan, where he was a tenured adjunct professor. He joined the curatorial staff of the National Academy of Design in New York in 1985 and served as that institution's Chief Curator from 1995 to 2004. In the latter year, he was named the Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Boston Athenaeum in Boston, a position he held until his retirement in 2018. He has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Luce Foundation, the Florence Gould Foundation, and the Lucellia Foundation. He is the author of books, articles, and exhibition catalogues on the history of American art and has lectured widely in the field. Dearinger began researching his family's history at the age of fifteen, and genealogy has been his avocation ever since. Having been a resident of New York City for nearly forty years, he and his spouse, the architect Darrell Ung, now live in Richmond, Virginia.