Laura Claridge for Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners (to be published by Random House)

The Lukas Work-in-Progress Award is given each year by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism to assist in the completion of a significant work of narrative nonfiction on an American topic of political or social concern.

The judges noted: “Laura Claridge thinks and writes about Emily Post in a way Tony Lukas would have cheered, producing the kind of rigorous and imaginative cultural history that he both pioneered and championed.” Claridge’s book is “a fresh look at the deeply influential advice-giver who showed that manners were about ethics, not just etiquette . . . .”