High Society: The Town & Country Picture Album, 1846-1996

Book Synopsis: For one hundred and fifty years Town and Country magazine has celebrated in print the lives of America's elite, those who by birth and wealth have been among the leaders of society. Style- and trendsetters, business tycoons, fashion plates, founders of the nation's great museums and other cultural institutions, these men and women (and their children) have been pictured and written about at work, at home and at play, season in and season out, with gusto and charm. Now, in this first-ever book-length anthology, those moments in society's elegant past are brought together in one glamorous album. Here are photographs of the wedding party of Jacqueline Bouvier and John Fitzgerald Kennedy at Hammersmith Farm; of Brooke Astor in the garden of her home at Northeast Harbor on Mount Desert Island, Maine; of the very beautiful Babe (Mrs. William) Paley as seen by Richard Avedon. Here are the great tycoons of American industry - Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Mellon, J. Paul Getty - and the grande dames who took such pains to launch their children on the sea of society. Here are the luxurious vacation places of America's aristocracy - Newport, Palm Beach, Bar Harbor - and the sports that filled the idle hours: golf, polo, lawn tennis, skiing. Cotillions at the Copley Plaza, coming out parties in Charleston, charity balls on Nob Hill, bachelor blasts at the "21" Club - all these and more fill these lively pages with glances at a style of American life that has persisted for the last century and a half.