The Gilded Age, Vol 1.
by Mark Twain
, Charles Dudley Warner
47 Members (3.50)
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The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first published in 1873. It satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America in the era now referred to as the Gilded Age. Although not one of Twain's best-known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast. The book is remarkable for two reasons--it is the show more only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life.The term gilded age, commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595): "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess."[citation needed] Gilding gold, which would be to put gold on top of gold, is excessive and wasteful, characteristics of the age Twain and Warner wrote about in their novel. Another interpretation of the title, of course, is the contrast between an ideal "Golden Age," and a less worthy "Gilded Age," as gilding is only a thin layer of gold over baser metal, so the title now takes on a pejorative meaning as to the novel's time, events and people.The novel concerns the efforts of a poor rural Tennessee family to become affluent by selling the 75,000 acres (300 km2) of unimproved land acquired by their patriarch, Silas "Si" Hawkins, in a timely manner. After several adventures in Tennessee, the family fails to sell the land and Si Hawkins dies. The rest of the Hawkins story line focuses on their beautiful adopted daughter, Laura. In the early 1870s, she travels to Washington, D.C. to become a lobbyist. With a Senator's help, she enters Society and attempts to persuade Congressmen to require the federal government to purchase the land.....Charles Dudley Warner (September 12, 1829 - October 20, 1900) was an American essayist, novelist, and friend of Mark Twain, with whom he co-authored the novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today...Samuel Langhorne Clemens (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910),better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. show lessTags
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2,751+ Works 208,740 Members
Mark Twain was born Samuel L. Clemens in Florida, Missouri on November 30, 1835. He worked as a printer, and then became a steamboat pilot. He traveled throughout the West, writing humorous sketches for newspapers. In 1865, he wrote the short story, The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, which was very well received. He then began a show more career as a humorous travel writer and lecturer, publishing The Innocents Abroad in 1869, Roughing It in 1872, and, Gilded Age in 1873, which was co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner. His best-known works are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mississippi Writing: Life on the Mississippi, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1910. (Bowker Author Biography) show less

123+ Works 1,935 Members
Charles Dudley Warner was born in Massachusetts in 1829. After practicing law in Chicago, he moved to Connecticut and became an associate editor and publisher of The Hartford Courant. In addition to writing travel essays for the Courant and for Harper's magazine, as well as several novels, he collaborated with Mark Twain on The Gilded Age. He died show more in 1900 show less
Common Knowledge
- Canonical title
- The Gilded Age, Vol 1.
- Disambiguation notice
- This is Volume 1 of 2. Please do not combine with the complete work or with Volume 2.
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