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 Etiquette, a perennial bestseller and touchstone of proper behavior.

A daughter of high society and one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily Price married financier Edwin Post. It was a hopeful union that ended in scandalous divorce. But the trauma forced Emily Post to become her own person. After writing novels for fifteen years, Emily 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 Emily Post’s death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave.

Laura Claridge is the author of several books, including Norman Rockwell: A Life and Tamara de Lempicka: A Life of Deco and Decadence. Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and won the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award. Claridge received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and literary theory and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997. She has written features and reviews for The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, and The Christian Science Monitor and has appeared frequently in the national media, including Today, CNN, NPR, and the BBC. She lives in New York’s Hudson Valley.