Emily Post

Emily Post ( Price; October 27, 1872 – September 25, 1960) was an American author, novelist, and socialite who wrote about etiquette.

Early life and education Post was born Emily Bruce Price in Baltimore, Maryland, possibly in October 1872. The precise date is unknown. (Primary documents conflict with the birthdate that she usually gave: October 27, 1872.) The burial records of her brother, William Lee Price, who died in infancy, give his dates as April 18, 1873 to December 6, 1875, but he could not have been born five months and 21 days after his sister. That she was born six months after he was is equally unlikely. Therefore, something is awry and is unresolvable from primary records. It is less likely for a contemporary burial record of a two-year-old to have gotten his birth year wrong than for an adult to have used an erroneous birth date. After being educated at home in her early years, Price attended Miss Graham's finishing school in New York after her family moved there.

The New York Times Dinitia Smith reports, in her review of Laura Claridge's 2008 biography of Post,

Emily was tall, pretty and spoiled. [...] She grew up in a world of grand estates, her life governed by carefully delineated rituals like the cotillion with its complex forms and its dances—the Fan, the Ladies Mocked, Mother Goose—called out in dizzying turns by the dance master.

Career

Post began to write once her two sons were old enough to attend boarding school. Her early work included humorous travel books, newspaper articles on architecture and interior design, and magazine serials for Harper's, Scribner's, and The Century. She wrote five novels: Flight of a Moth (1904), Purple and Fine Linen (1905), Woven in the Tapestry (1908), The Title Market (1909), and The Eagle's Feather (1910).

Post wrote her first etiquette book Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home (1922, frequently referenced as Etiquette) when she was 50. After 1931, Post spoke on radio programs and wrote a column on good taste for the Bell Syndicate. The column appeared daily in over 200 newspapers after 1932.

In her review of Claridge's 2008 biography of Post,

Frank Tashlin featured Post's caricature emerging from her etiquette book and scolding England's King Henry VIII about his lack of manners in the cartoon Have You Got Any Castles? (1938).

Pageant in 1950 named her the second most powerful woman in America, after Eleanor Roosevelt.

In 2008, Laura Claridge published Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, the first full-length biography of the author.

Emily Post Institute The Emily Post Institute, founded by Post in 1946, continues to operate as a family-run organization now in its fifth generation. The institute promotes etiquette principles centered on consideration, respect, and honesty, and produces books, educational programs, online resources, and media content addressing modern social and professional conduct. Its work reflects the ongoing adaptation of Post’s original ideas to contemporary cultural norms