Dear Mrs. Post, How can I serve a formal dinner for eight without a maid?” In her almost forty years as America’s acknowledged social arbiter, this was the query most often received by Emily Post. The answer was characteristically simple and precise: You cannot serve a formal dinner without a maid. But, she would continue, you can serve a gracious, if informal, dinner. Step by step, course by course, painstaking detail by painstaking detail, she would explain the process to nervous hostesses across the country. In her famous book on etiquette, in several years of daily radio broadcasts, in her column published internationally by over two hundred newspapers, Emily Post told the English-speaking world how to handle every social situation imaginable.

She had never intended to write an etiquette book. When Richard Duffy, editor at Funk & Wagnalls, first approached her about the idea in 1919, she replied, “It’s the most ridiculous thing I ever heard of.” But her good friend Frank Crowninshield, then editor of Vanity Fair magazine, knew how to appeal to the strong-minded Mrs. Post. He sent her a copy of a ponderous volume called Etiquette , which was enjoying a short-lived vogue at the time. The book’s condescending tone, its emphasis on elaborate rules and petty details, infuriated the well-bred Emily. Midway through, she flung the book on the floor and called Crowninshield. “Tell your friend Mr. DufFy to call me,” she said. “Tell him I’ll write him a book about etiquette. A sensible book. It’ll be a small book. I haven’t got much to say, and anyway, the whole subject can be reduced to a few simple rules.”

Her few simple rules took a mere 692 pages to enumerate. Etiquette, the Blue Book of Social Usage , was published in the summer of 1922 and was an immediate success. Within a few months of its publication, it replaced Giovanni Papini’s Life of Christ at the top of the non-fiction best-seller list. It soon ranked second only to the Bible on a list of books commonly pilfered from American bookstores and libraries. Emily Post became a household name—something no well-bred woman of the time could relish. “I might be a cosmetic or a ship or a fancy dessert like Charlotte Russe,” commented the dismayed author. But she could not shake her new-found notoriety. Americans in the twenties were obviously yearning for someone to tell them how to behave. The economic explosions of the late nineteenth century followed by the First World War had created a new breed of wealthy and upper middle-class families. These people and their imitators needed to acquire a gentility to match their fortunes—and they discovered it in Emily Post.

Mrs. Post’s credentials for her new-found role were impeccable. Born in 1872 and brought up in exclusive Tuxedo Park, New York, she had been educated since birth in