Samuel Ward McAllister (December 28, 1827 – January 31, 1895) was a popular arbiter of social taste in the Gilded Age of America, widely accepted as the authority to which families could be classified as the cream of New York society (The Four Hundred).

[1][2] McAllister wrote that after his marriage in 1853, he bought a farm on Narragansett Bay, planted trees and left for a three-year journey throughout Europe's great cities and spas—Bath, Pau, Bad Nauheim, and the like—where he observed the mannerisms of other wealthy Americans and titled nobility, returning to New York with his wife and two small children on October 15, 1858.

[a][3][4][5] Using his wife's wealth and his own social connections, he sought to become a tastemaker amongst New York's "Knickerbocracy", a collection of old merchant and landowning families who traced their lineage back to the days of colonial New Amsterdam.

[7] Although purported to be an index of New York's best families, McAllister's list was suspiciously top-heavy with nouveau riche industrialists and his southern allies, seeking a new start in the nation's financial capital after the American Civil War.

[8] He was an early summer colonist of Newport, Rhode Island, and was largely responsible for turning the town into a Mecca for the pleasure-seeking, status-conscious rich of the Gilded Age.

[9] Among the undesirables McAllister endeavored to exclude from the charmed circle of the Four Hundred were the many nouveau riche Midwesterners who poured into New York seeking social recognition.

In 1893, he wrote a column about the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in which he urged that if Chicago society hostesses wanted to be taken seriously, they should hire French chefs and "not frappé their wine too much".

[14] The book, and his hunger for media attention, did little to endear him to the old guard, who valued their privacy in an era when millionaires were the equivalent of modern movie stars.