Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Cookbook. Illustrated by Andy Warhol. From the personal files of America's foremost etiquette authority. A basic cookbook with easy to prepare recipes for both simple and festive meals. Hardcover 1961.
(Amy Vanderbilt's complete cookbook. From the personal fil...)
Amy Vanderbilt's complete cookbook. From the personal files of America's foremost etiquette authority. A basic cookbook with easy to prepare recipes for both simple and festive meals.
Amy Osborne Vanderbilt was an American author, columnist and designer. He also was an expert on etiquette.
Background
Amy Vanderbilt was born on July 22, 1908, on Staten Island, New York. She was the daughter of Joseph Mortimer Vanderbilt, an insurance broker, and Mary Estelle Brooks. Vanderbilt was a direct descendant of Jan Aoertsen van der Bilt, who settled on Long Island in 1650.
Her cousin was railroad and shipping magnate Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Her great-great-grandfather was a founder of the Bank of Manhattan, and her grandfather, Joseph L. Vanderbilt, invented the stitching pattern for baseballs.
Education
Vanderbilt journalism career began while she was still attending Curtis High School when she became a society and feature writer for the Staten Island Advance.
Upon graduation, she went to Switzerland to study home economics at Lausanne's Institute Heubi. She completed her education at the Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn and at New York University, where she studied journalism (1926 - 1928). A natural linguist, she was fluent in French and had a working knowledge of Spanish, Italian, German, Portuguese, and Dutch.
Career
Vanderbilt took a position as assistant advertising publicity director for the H. R. Mallinson Company, a silk manufacturing firm. A year later, she became a New York advertising agency account executive. Vanderbilt joined the American Spectator, a literary magazine as business manager in 1933 and concurrently wrote a syndicated column for the International News Service. A year later, she accepted an executive appointment as home service director for Tower Publications, where she remained until 1937. That year she became vice president of Publicity Associations, a New York City public relations firm whose clients included seventeen publishers.
Amy served as the organization's president from 1940 to 1945. At the same time, she developed her taste for published rules of etiquette as a consultant on entertaining and etiquette to the Royal Crest Sterling Company of Newark, New Jersey, a commission she held from 1940 through 1964. In the late 1940's, when Doubleday commissioned her to write Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette, she built a secluded office on the grounds of "Daisyfields. " "I knew that it was going to be a four-year job, " she explained. When the Complete Book of Etiquette, a seven-hundred-page indexed volume, appeared in 1952, it gained immediate acceptance as the modern guide to social behavior and crowned its author as Emily Post's successor.
Her topics expanded social decorum to include divorce proceedings, problem drinkers, and television appearances, an acknowledgment of the future pervasiveness of that medium. In its several editions the book has sold millions of copies. Publication of the etiquette book led to her association with United Features Syndicate beginning in 1954. She wrote a syndicated column entitled "Amy Vanderbilt's Etiquette, " for twenty years. She was a monthly contributor to McCall's in 1963 and to Ladies' Home Journal from 1965 to 1974.
Amy sporadically contributed to other magazines and newspapers, such as the New Yorker, Collier's, This Week, Better Homes and Gardens, American Home, the Christian Science Monitor, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York World-Telegram and Sun, and served as a consultant to the World Book Encyclopedia, the Book of Knowledge, and the World Almanac. In addition to her career in etiquette, in the 1960's she designed and promoted her own line of dresses.
Vanderbilt died of injuries received in a fall from the second story of her hundred-year-old New York City brownstone; it is unclear whether her death was a suicide or an accident.
Achievements
In 1952, Vanderbilt published the best-selling book Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette. The book, later retitled Amy Vanderbilt's Etiquette, has been updated and is still in circulation.
(Hardcover no dust jacket 1963 733p. 8.50x5.75x2.00 RULES ...)
book
Views
Quotations:
"The basis of good manners is kindness. "
"I have no use for people who exhibit manners. "
"Good manners have much to do with the emotions. To make them ring true, one must feel them, not merely exhibit them. "
"Parents must get across the idea that "I love you always, but sometimes I do not love your behavior. "
"When we learn to give thanks, we are learning to concentrate not on the bad things, but on the good things in our lives. "
"Only a great fool or a great genius is likely to flout all social grace with impunity, and neither one, doing so, makes the most comfortable companion. "
"I am a journalist in the field of etiquette. I try to find out what the most genteel people regularly do, what traditions they have discarded, what compromises they have made. "
"Everyone knows that a man can marry even if he reaches the age of 102, is penniless, and has all his facilities gone. There is always some woman willing to take a chance on him. "
"Ceremony is-really a protection, too, in times of emotional involvement, particularly at death. If we have a social formula to guide us and do not have to extemporize, we feel better able to handle life. "
"We must learn which ceremonies may be breached occasionally at our convenience and which ones may never be if we are to live pleasantly with our fellow man. "
Personality
Vanderbilt exemplified her special interest in children by devoting an entire chapter of the Complete Book of Etiquette to the family and social education of children and another to adoption, teenage problems, and community responsibilities to youngsters.
Her love of children went beyond her own family. A longtime sponsor of the Foster Parents' Plan, she "adopted" four children in countries ravaged by World War II.
Quotes from others about the person
Time magazine reported that Miss Vanderbilt "has not only viewed etiquette as a cradle-to-grave proposition but turned out advice on every conceivable aspect of life. "
Connections
In 1929, Vanderbilt married Robert S. Brinkerhoff; the couple took up residence at "Daisyfields, " her Westport, Connecticut, house. The Brinkerhoffs divorced in 1935 after a childless marriage, and Vanderbilt wed Morton G. Clark a few months afterward. She split with Clark in 1945 and received custody of their only child.
Later that year, she married New York photographer Hans Knopf; they had two sons. In 1954, she divorced Knopf. Her last marriage was to Curtis B. Kellar, a corporate attorney, in 1968.
