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POST, EMILY PRICE 1872-1960

WRITER, AUTHORITY OF ETIQUETTE, INTERIOR DECORATOR

Genteel Beginnings

Raised in a genteel, upper-class Manhattan home, young Emily Price personally embodied the ideals of etiquette that later made her famous. She was born in Baltimore but moved with her family to New York City in 1877, when her father, Bruce Price, gained national prominence as an architect. Price was reared by a governess and educated at Miss Graham's finishing school. Her extraordinary beauty and manners attracted wide attention.

Young Matron

Soon after her New York society debut, Emily Price married Edwin M. Post, a businessman. The couple lived on Staten Island and then in Manhattan, and Emily Post made frequent trips to Europe. She wrote long, lively letters home while abroad, which she turned into her 1904 novel, The Flight of a Moth. The Posts had two sons, Edwin Jr. and Bruce Price, the latter of whom died in 1927, but her husband's extramarital affairs led to the couple's divorce in 1905.

Novels and Sentimentalism

Forced to supplement her income to raise her sons, Mrs. Price Post, the name she preferred after her divorce, turned to freelance writing. During the next twenty years, she wrote six novels and many essays and short stories on life, adventure, and romance among the wealthy. Her writing met with instant success. She continued to travel and in 1915 motored from New York to California with her son Edwin to attend the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. She published her travel journal, first in magazines and then as a book, By Motor to the Golden Gate (1916).

Etiquette

In 1921 Richard Duffy, an editor at Funk and Wagnalls, asked Post to write a guide to American etiquette. After discovering that no such work existed, Post enthusiastically took on the project. She worked zealously for ten months and produced Etiquette in Society, in Business, in Politics, and at Home, published in 1922. An immediate best-seller, the book made Post a celebrity and the nation's arbiter of proper social behavior. Post wrote with humor, good judgment, detail, and authority, thereby answering postwar Americans' need for order in their changing relationships. Her book, the title of which changed to Etiquette: and The Blue Book of Social Usage, codified and modified traditions and informal practices, defining proper behavior in the unconventional 1920s.

Final Years

In the 1930s and 1940s, while she was in her sixties and seventies, Post wrote a McCall's magazine etiquette column that was later syndicated, and she had a weekly radio show. She organized a cooperative-apartment building in New York City and built a summer home on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. In her later years Post turned to gardening and home decorating and published several editions of her own favorite book, The Personality of a House, on interior decorating. She established the Emily Post Institute in 1946 and, with her son Edwin as adviser, managed her business empire. Never condescending, Post was embraced by the anxious middle class, who turned to her witty fictional families named Wellborn and Highbrow for standards of politeness and decor in America's mobile, democratic society.