A Biography of American Manners Doyenne Emily Post

FAIN: FB-52055-05

Laura Powell Claridge
Unaffiliated Independent Scholar (Saugerties, NY 12477-0000)

"Queen of America," a critical biography of America's doyenne of manners, Emily Post, surveys the transformation of this country's cultural sensibility from a Victorian to a modern one. Post was a figure widely but erroneously considered to be one of the 20th century's most consistent voices. I use Post's enthusiastic embrace of the new as a kind of template with which we can reconsider the social, economic and gender revolutions of the aspiring middle class that occurred from the beginning of the century until her death, in 1960.