"There will be an empty chair at the deal table at Tony’s, when the youngsters gather to discuss life, sex, literature, the drama, what is a gentleman and whether or not to go on to Helen Morgan’s Club when the place closes," Dorothy Parker wrote in 1927, when the new edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette arrived, "for I shall be at home among my book."

Same here, when Emily Post, a biography by Laura Claridge, arrived nearly 80 years later.

Mrs. Post, surely one of the most influential women in modern America, was long overdue for a biography. She needed to be rescued from the fork-in-the-eye treatment routinely accorded to anyone in the noble profession of etiquette: The assumption that anyone who encourages others to behave themselves must be so intensely focused on correct fork selection as to be opposed to such distractions as creativity, democracy and sex.

It turns out that Mrs. Post played the banjo, designed the Manhattan building in which she lived, sold jokes to magazines, achieved renown as an amateur actress, published several novels, did professional interior decoration, got German Jewish World War II orphans documented to be adopted in the United States, wrote a daily newspaper column, submitted dress sketches to the renowned French couturier Worth who made them for her, won first prize in a magazine’s short story contest, served as a protocol adviser to the Department of State and became a radio star. Furthermore she always wore red shoes.

Yet even during her lifetime, when her most successful venture, Etiquette, was running second in sales only to the Bible, Emily Post was ridiculed as a period-piece snob focused on minutia.

Her book argued the very opposite of snobbery: that the "best people" were not those with the most money or family history, but the best behaved. Updating ten editions, from 1922 to 1955, she added such relevant sections as how to treat psychologically and physically damaged veterans of World War II.

Etiquette books are intended to correct particular social problems: Erasmus wanted his students to be presentable enough to be heard by the power structure; Lord Chesterfield wanted his illegitimate son to be less of a bastard than himself, and the Industrial Revolution etiquette writers wanted to help the newly rich imitate the suddenly formerly rich. Now we are burdened with the elementary job of persuading people to curb their most provocative impulses for the sake of community peace.

Mrs. Post sought to develop an egalitarian society where behavior standards were not the lowest common denominator but the pleasantest and most considerate patterns. Although she led a privileged life, she kept correcting herself in regard to serious matters (she begged a suffragette to forgive her for having made light of feminism) and laughing at herself for her ludicrous transgressions (the most spectacular of which was losing her panties on a public street).

But although Mrs. Post attracted vast audiences of immigrants and citizens who sought an American standard of behavior that was universally respectful and graceful, her publishers chipped away at her — and so does this biographer.

Her wit escapes them. The publishers kept trying to kill off such enchanting characters as Mr. Richan Vulgar, who travels for the purpose of meeting on shipboard those who would not consent to meet him on land, and Mrs. Newmother, whose dinner conversation topic is "the new tooth in baby’s head." Over Mrs. Post’s dead body, they disappeared and posthumous editions were cast in a humorless, pop-therapeutic style.
Her biographer merely sabotages the humor; for example, repeating an anecdote that charmed Edmund Wilson among others, and omitting the punch line. She relates Mr. Kindheart’s assuring the hostess of a dinner party where everything went wrong that it didn’t matter, as if that provided relief. Mrs. Post had added the chilling and funny insight that this very act of kindness made the hostess realize, for the first time, just how dreadful her party was.