from delancyplace.com:

In today's excerpt - Emily Post's landmark book, Etiquette: In Society, in Business,
in Politics and at Home, debuted during the raucous flaunting of morals and conventions
known as the Jazz Age. Yet the book immediately became an overwhelming best-seller,
as it codified anew the eternal idea that how you treat others matters:

"Emily Post witnessed Reconstruction and Jim Crow, as well as the emergence of Martin
Luther King. Her youth was shaped by the high Victorian era, cosseted by the Gilded
Age, and then tossed about in the restless years culminating in World War I. Through
the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, World War II and its domestic aftermath
(all revolutions of a sort), Emily Post's Etiquette: In Society, in Business, in
Politics and at Home - magisterial, impatient, collegial, and neighborly - would
outlast the ages it reflected and corrected.

"When it debuted in 1922, Etiquette represented a fifty-year-old woman at her wisest
and a country at its wildest. The preternaturally confident au*thor had her feet
firmly planted in the Jazz Age, taking its thoughtful mea*sure in her meticulous
way. What Emily initially called her 'little blue book' debuted in a Manhattan society
intrigued by the Algonquin's Round Table, where Harold Ross, editor of a new, quickly
influential weekly, the New Yorker, held court with a whiskey in hand. Even as sales
skyrocketed for Emily Post's guide to the good but proper life, the same decade
would also nurture Dorothy Parker and Ernest Hemingway, Claudette Colbert and Clara
Bow, George Gershwin and Louis Armstrong. Etiquette assumed its position within
the heady cultural milieu of the 1920s, shaped by the era of its birth even while
modifying it.

"At its broadest, etiquette - the measure of how we treat one another - reaches
across class, race, gender, and culture. For many women, particularly (and through
their transmission to their sons and husbands), Etiquette long fashioned our country's
idea and ideal of what it was to pursue a gracious - possibly even a moral - life.
Attention to behavior, after all, preoccupied the founders of our nation. Sixteen-year-old
George Washington had written his pamphlet Rules of Civility & Decent Behaviour
in Company and Conversation; A Book of Etiquette believing that everything he already
knew about getting on in life was worth sharing with others.

"Though never a head of state, Emily Post didn't lack for recognition. In 1976 and
again in 1990, Life magazine would laud her as one of the most im*portant Americans
of the twentieth century. Etiquette, by the 1930s having sold over a million copies,
would continue to be touted in the most unlikely moments and places. The list of
extravagant citations the book has received in the past few years alone includes
admirers as disparate as P. J. O'Rourke, reminiscing about learning how to fit into
society through Emily's book; Joan Didion, using Etiquette to confront her grief
over her spouse's death; and Tim Page, a Washington Post music critic, discovering
that Etiquette could help him cope with Asperger's syndrome. ...

"How could the promise that etiquette bestows be maintained through*out the [tumultuous]
twentieth century? How, in the face of massive human and natural evils, could Americans
believe that considerate social intercourse remained a significant issue? That politesse
mattered? If misleadingly superficial at first glance, however, the lady's solution
holds up after all. Emily Post was not alone in maintaining that the art of treating
people well is the other side to the act of waging war."
Author: Laura Claridge
Title: Emily Post
Publisher: Random House
Date: Copyright 2008 by Laura Claridge
Pages: xi-xiii

Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners
by Laura Claridge by Random House
Hardcover ~ Release Date: 2008-10-14