Society as I Have Found It

The self-appointed arbiter of New York high society, Ward McAllister—who coined the phrase ‘the Four Hundred’ for the city’s social elite—recounts a lifetime among the wealthy, the fashionable, and the ambitious in the Gilded Age. Full of anecdote, snobbery, and unintentional comedy, his memoir offers an insider’s tour of grand balls, exclusive dinners, and the elaborate rituals by which old money and new jostled for status. A revealing and entertaining document of Gilded Age America, it captures the glamour and absurdity of a vanished social world. Society as I Have Found It is a fascinating window onto the manners and vanities of nineteenth-century high society.