Society as I Have Found It

Society as I Have Found It is a book of memoirs written by the author Ward McAllister. In this book McAllister reflects on life of influential people in Gilded Age in New York. This work is a mixture of memoirs, advices and details of New York's history at the turn of 20th century.

Samuel Ward McAllister (1827 –1895) was a popular arbiter of social taste in the Gilded Age of late 19th-century America. He was widely accepted as the authority as to which families could be classified as the cream of New York society (the Four Hundred). But his listings were also questioned by those excluded from them, and his own personal motives of self-aggrandizement were noted.