Product Description

“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 the myth, the authority on good manners who has outlasted all comers? Award-winning author Laura Claridge presents the first authoritative biography of the unforgettable woman who changed the mindset of millions of Americans, an engaging book that sweeps from the Gilded Age to the 1960s.

Born shortly after the Civil War, Emily Post was a daughter of high society, the only child of an ambitious Baltimore architect, Bruce Price, and his wellborn wife. Within a few years of his daughter’s birth, Price moved his family to New York City, where they mingled with the Roosevelts and the Astors as well as with the new crowd in town–J. P. Morgan and the Vanderbilt clan. Blossoming into one of Manhattan’s most sought-after debutantes, Emily went on to marry Edwin Post, planning to re-create in her own home the happiness she’d observed between her parents. Instead, she would find herself in the middle of a scandalous divorce, its humiliating details splashed across the front pages of New York newspapers for months.

Traumatic though it was, the end of her marriage forced Emily Post to become her own person. She would spend the next fifteen years writing novels and attending high-powered literary events alongside the likes of Mark Twain and Edith Wharton, but in middle age she decided she would 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 its wildest. Claridge addresses the secret of Etiquette’s tremendous success and gives us a panoramic view of the culture from which Etiquette took its shape, as its author meticulously updated her book twice a decade to keep it consistent with America’s constantly changing social landscape.

A tireless advocate for middle-class and immigrant Americans, Emily Post became the emblem of a new kind of manners in which etiquette and ethics were forever entwined. Now, nearly fifty years after her death, we still feel her enormous influence on how we think Best Society should behave.

Praise for Emily Post

“Given the ubiquitousness of her repeatedly revised magnum opus, Etiquette, first published in 1922, we think of Emily Post as an institution rather than a human being. But she was a woman of substance and sensitivity. The first to fully portray this pioneer, Claridge is becoming the sort of biographer readers will follow anywhere, and one hopes she’ll continue in the vein that yielded Norman Rockwell (2001) and now this absorbing study of a keenly perceptive ethicist second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in the immensity of her influence. A child of privilege born in the wake of the Civil War, smart and beautiful Emily Price married a rascal. The pain and humiliation of her divorce from Edwin Post fostered her devotion to writing (she was a successful novelist) and seeded the compassion and advocacy for women that shaped her highly moral approach to etiquette. Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a burgeoning American public transformed by immigration, industrialization, war, and women’s and civil rights, and hungry for guidance in social and familial situations. A best-selling writer and hugely popular radio personality, Post equated etiquette with character and ensured a ‘democratization of manners.’ Claridge greatly deepens our appreciation for Post’s achievements and brings forward the impressive woman behind the do’s and don’ts.” ---Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

“It was the genius of Emily Post to show us that manners are the small coin of morality….Emily Post became perhaps the most important and certainly the most influential moralist of the 20th century. It is Laura Claridge’s genius to explain the surprising and improbable background and equally amazing personality of Emily Post.” — P.J. O’Rourke, author of Modern Manners: An Etiquette Book for Rude People

“What she [Claridge] has given us is not only a canny and insightful read, but when she calls her Emily ‘a domestic anthropologist,’ you know she’s right. Brava!”–Nancy Milford, author of Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay

“Laura Claridge has given us so much more than a mere biography of this august arbiter of good manners; [She] has flung open the doors of an entire society — she has shown us in enchanting, mesmerizing detail how the modern city of New York was built and made.” -- Carolyn See, author of Making a Literary Life

“… a biography as rich and engaging as a portrait by John Singer Sargent.” — Daniel Mark Epstein, author of The Lincolns: Portrait of a Marriage

“Laura Claridge’s masterful Emily Post tells the story of a lively heroine, raised in a Gilded Age New York of silk-stockings and debutante balls, who wrote one of the enduring bestsellers of the 20th century…. Laura Claridge’s vivid, graceful biography of Emily Post is an essential contribution to American social history.”  ——Eric Homberger, author of Mrs. Astor’s New York

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #293566 in Books
• Published on: 2008-10-14
• Released on: 2008-10-14
• Format: Deckle Edge
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 544 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780375509216
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From The Washington Post
From The Washington Post's Book World/washingtonpost.com Reviewed by Amanda Vaill It takes her 410 pages to do it, but toward the end of her well-mannered biography of Emily Post, Laura Claridge finally airs some dirty -- or at least frayed -- linen. At the age of 73, she reports, the doyenne of American manners "lost her panties in the middle of Manhattan" when their elastic apparently gave out. Stepping out of the "web of lace-trimmed silk," she stuffed the unfortunate garment into her purse and proceeded on her way as if nothing had happened, later telling a journalist, self-deprecatingly, that she had "dropped her drawers on Broadway." This anecdote makes you think that Emily Post might actually have been human, an impression reinforced a few pages later when, after breaking her ankle tumbling down an unexpected set of steps, she wryly remarked that at least "my hat was on straight the entire time!" But -- perhaps because Post's detailed journals have been lost to posterity, or because the author had limited access to her subject's personal correspondence -- Post's voice is rarely heard in this biography. Which is a pity, because when we do get to hear from her directly and informally, instead of in the judiciously phrased sentences of her advice columns or her 1922 classic, the oft-revised and still-available Etiquette, she comes alive as a person, not a personage. Laura Claridge, the author of biographies of Norman Rockwell and the Polish Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, as well as books of literary and gender criticism, seems more interested in Post's emblematic role than in her personal one, however; she depicts a life short on incident but freighted with significance. The only child of a Baltimore-born architect and the heiress of a Pennsylvania coal baron with Mayflower ancestors, Emily Price Post epitomized at birth the nexus of breeding and entrepreneurial moxie that characterized American society in the Gilded Age. Her father, Bruce Price, moved his family to New York, where he built skyscrapers and apartment houses for the city's emergent urban plutocrats and collaborated with the tobacco mogul Pierre Lorillard IV to develop Tuxedo Park, the millionaires' enclave a few hours north of Manhattan. Her mother, meanwhile, managed the Price stock portfolio and social connections. As a girl, Claridge writes, Emily was fascinated by design and architecture, and vastly preferred her "ethereal" father, with his "formidable talent . . . unworldly magnetism and preternaturally good looks," to her "stolid" and practical mamma. This Oedipal geometry seemingly shaped Post's life. "Without ever pondering the motivation for the choices she made as an adult," Claridge writes, "Emily would set out to prove to herself, most of all, that she was a worthy heir to Bruce Price." Although she spent the year after her society debut traipsing after her father to job sites in Canada and New England, Emily made no serious move to follow him professionally. Claridge says that the reasons are "unclear." Perhaps it was at her mother's insistence, she suggests, or "maybe Emily lacked talent." But marriage to Edwin Main Post, the scion of one of New York's old Dutch families, inadvertently opened another career path. Mr. Post turned out to be a womanizing stock speculator whose peccadilloes were exposed on the front pages when he tried to stiff a would-be blackmailer. After loyally appearing with her husband at the blackmailer's criminal trial, Emily sued for divorce and went to work to support herself and her two sons in the style to which she had become accustomed. This development "signaled, as much as personal freedom for both spouses, a new era of self-determination for unhappily married middle- and upper-class citizens," says Claridge; it also launched Emily Post as a writer. Her first efforts were novels that transmuted her own and her friends' experiences into a kind of Edwardian chick lit. When their sales curve started heading downward, she moved into journalism, writing advice columns and -- when she acquired her first automobile in 1914 -- travel articles for Collier's magazine about a cross-country road trip. She was, Claridge points out, moving with the times, and "finding the world taking shape around her more hospitable than the one she'd inherited." It was in part to make that world more hospitable to others that Post embarked on her magnum opus, Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, in which she declared that "charm of manner . . . and instinctive consideration for the feelings of others, are the credentials by which society the world over recognizes its chosen members." Despite the book's "glacial prose" and a morality-play dramatis personae that included such characters as the Toploftys, the Kindharts, Mrs. Bobo Gilding and the Richan Vulgars, Claridge argues that Etiquette's emphasis on manners over money places it in a "triumvirate of the modern moment," with Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt and Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence. By the 1930s it had sold over a million copies, and its author had become a brand name, with a syndicated newspaper column and radio show, all of which she had engineered on her own initiative (and often without the help of an agent). The book remained on bestseller lists through World War II and the social changes that followed; and although attempts to extend her reach to television were (in the words of her grandson and manager) "a disaster," Post's influence and activity continued well into the 1950s: The last edition of Etiquette overseen by its author was published in 1955, and the book has never gone out of print. Much of Claridge's narrative is devoted to an examination of Post's career, and accounts of contractual negotiations -- not to mention tallies of sales and circulation figures, exegeses of revisions and lengthy quotes from reviews -- don't always make for compelling reading. Such details do, however, provide a measure of the ways in which a girl who just wanted to be a worthy heir to her father turned herself into one of the most powerful women in America, second only to Eleanor Roosevelt, according to a 1950 poll of women journalists. They also show how (as Claridge puts it) Post's Etiquette was "a cultural history of her nation." In 1960 -- having lived through the introduction of the telephone, automobile, airplane, radio and television -- Emily Post died politely in her bed. "Just over two weeks later," Claridge tells us, "during a General Assembly meeting at the United Nations, Comrade Nikita Khrushchev removed his shoe and banged it on the table." As Life magazine asked, "What Would Emily Post Have Said?"
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Despite her limited access to Emily Post's personal papers, Laura Claridge does her best to bring Post to life against the ever-changing cultural landscape of the early 20th century. While the New York Times praised Claridge as an "exhaustive researcher," other critics complained of the author's frequent digressions and the glut of useless information: "Do we need the curtain time of the production in which Emily had a bit part at age 6?" bemoans the New York Times Book Review. Some critics also questioned Claridge's interpretation of facts and her unfamiliarity with matters of etiquette. However, Claridge does succeed in unveiling the fun-loving, banjo-playing workaholic behind the myth—and forever demolishes the image of the fussy prude obsessing over fork usage.
Copyright 2008 Bookmarks Publishing LLC

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Given the ubiquitousness of her repeatedly revised magnum opus, Etiquette, first published in 1922, we think of Emily Post as an institution rather than a human being. But she was a woman of substance and sensitivity. The first to fully portray this pioneer, Claridge is becoming the sort of biographer readers will follow anywhere, and one hopes she’ll continue in the vein that yielded Norman Rockwell (2001) and now this absorbing study of a keenly perceptive ethicist second only to Eleanor Roosevelt in the immensity of her influence. A child of privilege born in the wake of the Civil War, smart and beautiful Emily Price married a rascal. The pain and humiliation of her divorce from Edwin Post fostered her devotion to writing (she was a successful novelist) and seeded the compassion and advocacy for women that shaped her highly moral approach to etiquette. Claridge chronicles Post’s remarkable ability to discern the needs of a burgeoning American public transformed by immigration, industrialization, war, and women’s and civil rights, and hungry for guidance in social and familial situations. A best-selling writer and hugely popular radio personality, Post equated etiquette with character and ensured a “democratization of manners.” Claridge greatly deepens our appreciation for Post’s achievements and brings forward the impressive woman behind the do’s and don’ts. --Donna Seaman

Customer Reviews

Emily Post
Emily Post is written with thorough attention to detail, skillfully intertwining the private, public, and mythical icon into a very real person. Ms. Claridge intersperses this biography on with so many entertaining anecdotes that despite being a lengthy biography, it has a light touch. Ms. Claridge's writing has the wonderful combination of being both intellectually satisfying and very readable at the end of a long day.

The Original Miss Manners
Laura Claridge has written the definitive biography of Emily Post. A long account at nearly 550 pages, the author has included every piece of information about her family of origin, her childhood, disasterous marriage and arbitrator of American manners. Fortunately, her chatty conversational style of writing saves the reader when one reads information that has little to do with the story. Ms. Post had an interesting life that became immortal when she decided to write a book about proper behavior in 1922. Being the first to do so made her famous and alone in her field for three decades. The author includes the cultural surroundings of her life to make this a book for the reader to go back in time. Her life stretched from the post Civil War era to the post World War II era until her death at the age of 88.

Emliy Post
I have to admit. I had a really hard time getting through this book. It took me 6 or 8 weeks to finish it. (I read Kushiel's Scion (Kushiel's Legacy) which has 200 more pages in 3 weeks, so it was more the lack of interest in the material's presentation than the length of the book.) When Shana asked for some one to take over the responsibility of this book I thought, "How interesting. She must have lead an exciting life." Well, she did lead a fairly exciting life, but the presentation was so dry.

Emily Post was related to the Roosevelt's (she thought Eleanor was too involved in politics and causes), she wrote more than Etiquette and played in the concrete base of the Statue of Liberty! I know I would have enjoyed Emily Post much more if I could have taken my time and read it in pieces over a few months rather than with a deadline. If you have more than a passing interest in Emily Post herself or in the periods that this book covers (1920's to 1950's) I'd recommend this book.