Laura Claridge has written books ranging from feminist theory to biography and popular culture, most recently the story of an American icon, Emily Post: Daughter of the Gilded Age, Mistress of American Manners, for which she received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. This project also received the J. Anthony Lukas Prize for a Work in Progress, administered by the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Born in Clearwater, Florida, Laura received her Ph.D. in British Romanticism and Literary Theory from the University of Maryland in 1986. She taught in the English departments at Converse and Wofford colleges in Spartanburg, SC, and was a tenured professor of English at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis until 1997.

Laura’s biography of iconic publisher Blanche Knopf, The Lady with the Borzoi, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in April, 2016.

We met a her home in New York’s Hudson Valley to discuss Blanche’s role as publisher, and wife to Alfred Knopf.