Mark Twain 
The Gilded Age 

‘The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today’ is a novel which satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society. The book is remarkable for two reasons – it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. The novel gave the era its name: the period of U.S. history from the 1870s to about 1900 is now referred to as the Gilded Age.

About the author

Mark Twain (real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910), was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecturer. He was lauded as the greatest humorist of the United States, and William Faulkner called him ‘the father of American literature’. His novels include ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ (1876) and its sequel, the ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ (1884), the latter often called ‘The Great American Novel’.