“What would Emily Post do?” Even today, Americans cite the author of the perennial bestseller Etiquette as a touchstone for proper behavior. But who was the woman behind themyth, the authority on good manners who has outlasted all comers?Award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritativebiography of the unforgettable woman who changed the mindset ofmillions of Americans, an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Ageto the 1960s.
Born shortly after the Civil War, Emily Post was adaughter of high society, the only child of an ambitious Baltimorearchitect, Bruce Price, and his wellborn wife. Within a few years ofhis daughter’s birth, Price moved his family to New York City, wherethey mingled with the Roosevelts and the Astors as well as with the newcrowd in town–J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt clan. Blossoming into oneof Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily went on to marryEdwin Post, planning to re-create in her own home the happiness she’dobserved between her parents. Instead, she would find herself in themiddle of a scandalous divorce, its humiliating details splashed acrossthe front pages of New York newspapers for months.
Traumatic though it was, the end of her marriage forced Emily Post tobecome her own person. She would spend the next fifteen years writingnovels and attending high-powered literary events alongside the likesof Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, but in middle age she decided shewould try something different.
When it debuted in 1922 with a tiny first print run, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest–and a country at itswildest. Claridge
addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which Etiquette tookits shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decadeto keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing sociallandscape.
A tireless advocate for middle-class and immigrantAmericans, Emily Post became the emblem of a new kind of manners inwhich etiquette and ethics were forever entwined. Now, nearly fiftyyears after her death, we still feel her enormous influence on how wethink Best Society should behave.
