Emily Post was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 3, 1872, and educated by governesses and at private schools in Baltimore and New York. She spent her summers at Bar Harbor, Maine, and Tuxedo Park, New York, which her father Bruce Price, a prominent architect, had been commissioned to design and develop.
The season of her debut Emily Price met Edwin Post, her husband-to-be, at a ball in one of Fifth Avenue’s elegant mansions. Following a fashionable wedding and a honeymoon tour of the Continent, Mrs. Post’s first home was in New York’s Washington Square. When her two sons were old enough to attend boarding school, she turned her attention to writing. Her romantic stories of European and American society were serialized in several popular magazines, and many were successfully published in book form. She became a “traveling correspondent,” crossing the United States by car and touring Europe on the eve of World War I. Her stories were published in Vanity Fair, Collier’s and McCall’s.
Upon publication in 1922 her book, “Etiquette: In Society, In Business, In Politics and At Home,” topped the nonfiction bestseller list, and the phrase “according to Emily Post” soon entered our language as the final word on the subject of social conduct. Mrs. Post, who as a girl had been told that well-bred women cannot work, was suddenly a celebrity and an outstanding American career woman, a position she maintained throughout her lifetime. Her numerous books, a syndicated newspaper column, and a regular network radio program made Emily Post a figure of national stature and importance.
Emily Post’s successor, Elizabeth Post, completed her first revision of the basic etiquette book in 1965 and until 1995 updated four major editions, in addition to other books on the subject of etiquette.
