Society As I Have Found It

McAllister (1827-95) was the self-appointed arbiter of New York society from the 1860s to the early 1890s. He coined the phrase "The Four Hundred" which, according to him, was the number of people in New York who really mattered, and named the official list in the New York Times on February 16 1892. This memoir published in 1890, along with his hunger for media attention, did little to endear him to the old guard who valued their privacy.