EMILY POST
Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners
In an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the 1960s, award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritative biography of Emily Post, who changed the mindset of millions of Americans with her book Etiquette, a perennial bestseller and touchstone of proper behavior.
A daughter of high society and one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Price married financier Edwin Post. It was a hopeful union that ended in a scandalous divorce. But the trauma forced Post to become her own person. After writing novels for fifteen years, Post took on a different sort of project. When it debuted in 1922, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest—and a country at its wildest. Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which it took its shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decade to keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing social landscape. Now, nearly fifty years after Post’s death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave.
