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Emily Post (née Price; October 27, 1872 – September 25, 1960) was an American author, novelist, and socialite famous for writing about etiquette.
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 ball with its complex forms and its dances—the Fan, the Ladies Mocked, Mother Goose—called out in dizzying turns by the dance master.
Price met her future husband, Edwin Main Post, a prominent banker, at a ball in a Fifth Avenue mansion. Following their wedding in 1892 and a honeymoon tour of Europe, they lived in New York's Washington Square. They also had a country cottage, named "Emily Post Cottage", in Tuxedo Park, which was one of four Bruce Price Cottages she inherited from her father. The couple moved to Staten Island and had two sons, Edwin Main Post Jr. (1893) and Bruce Price Post (1895).
Emily and Edwin divorced in 1905 because of his affairs with and fledgling actresses, which made him the target of blackmail.
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. It became a best-seller with numerous editions over the following decades. 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, The New York Times Dinitia Smith explains the keys to Post's popularity:
Such books had always been popular in America: the country's exotic mix of immigrants and Nouveau riche were eager to fit in with the establishment. Men had to be taught not to blow their noses into their hands or to spit tobacco onto ladies' backs. Arthur M. Schlesinger, who wrote Learning How to Behave: A Historical Study of American Etiquette Books in 1946, said that etiquette books were part of "the leveling-up process of democracy," an attempt to resolve the conflict between the democratic ideal and the reality of class. But Post's etiquette books went far beyond those of her predecessors. They read like short-story collections with recurring characters: the Toploftys, the Eminents, the Richan Vulgars, the Gildings, and the Kindharts.
In 1946, Post founded The Emily Post Institute, which continues her work.
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.
On May 28, 1998, the United States Postal Service issued a 32¢ stamp featuring Post as part of their Celebrate the Century stamp sheet series.
In 2008, Laura Claridge published Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, the first full-length biography of the author.
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