Emily Post
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Emily Post

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

Post was born Emily Bruce Price in Baltimore, Maryland, possibly in October 1872. The precise date is unknown. Her father was the architect Bruce Price, famed for designing luxury communities. Her mother Josephine (Lee) Price of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania was the daughter of Washington Lee, a wealthy coal baron and owner of a Pennsylvania mine. 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.

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 chorus girls and fledgling actresses, which made him the target of blackmail.

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). In 1916, she published By Motor to the Golden Gate—a recount of a road trip she made from New York to San Francisco on the Lincoln Highway with her son Edwin and another companion.

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.

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