The best books about American High Society

How did we get from the Four Hundred to the Kardashians? Amory, a Boston Brahmin and America’s foremost 20th Century social historian, unlocked the secrets of American “Society” from the inside and from the Mayflower to the moment Celebrity conquered all. Amory knew where the bodies were buried and how to pry secrets out of living somebodies. Trenchant and often hysterical, I’ve turned to this book so often for inspiration and information that my copy is totally tattered.

After the WASPs of The Social Register, the next great wave of American wealth was generated by the German-Jewish upper class that rose at the end of the 19th Century. Weaving together the stories of the Loeb, Lehman, Lewisohn, Schiff, Seligman, Goldman, Straus, Warburg, and Guggenheim families, Birmingham created a classic of the kind of group biography I aspire to write.  

I was fortunate to cross paths with Curtis when I went to work for what were called the women’s pages” of The New York Times, which she had written for and edited before rising to the exalted op-ed page. When I got that job, my soon-to-be wife gave me a copy of this book—a collection of Curtis dispatches from the front lines of Society—and said, “This is what you can do if you’re good at it.”

When I was a boy, I dreamed of writing pop fiction. As a young writer in the 1980s, I was riveted by the novels of Dominick Dunne, a former film and TV producer who’d started covering Society as a journalist for Vanity Fair, but also wrote novels where he told the sort of stories that couldn’t get past fact-checkers and libel lawyers. This one is the most trenchant and revealing book ever written about the “Nouvelle Society” of the Reagan years. It’s as delicious as dinner used to be at Le Cirque.

This one is a bit of an obscurity. Another roman a clef from the 1980s, it’s a murder mystery set in Manhattan Society, only this time, it’s about the ways the high and mighty get down and dirty—and at the time, it was said to be based on several very real Upper East Side New York gentleman whose behavior was anything but gentle. At the time, many knew but no one talked about the sleaze and moral corruption that lurked in the dark corners of the world of wealth. I heard enough and saw enough to think that Stewart knew a lot.