The Gilded Age

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... Mark Twain (November 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910), real name Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher, and lecture.. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called "The Great American Novel..". 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. 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 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 US history from the 1870s to about 1900 is now referred to as the Gilded Age. Plot summaryThe 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." (Act IV, scene 2) 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 in a timely manner the 75,000 acres (300 km2) of unimproved land acquired by their patriarch, Silas "Si" Hawkins. 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. A parallel story written by Warner concerns two young upperclass men, Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, who seek their fortunes in land in a novel way. They make a journey with a group intent on surveying land in Tennessee in order to acquire it for speculation. Philip is good-natured but plodding. He is in love with Ruth Bolton, an aspiring physician and feminist. Henry is a born salesman, charming but superficial. The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society, illustrated by the Hawkinses as well as Ruth's well-educated father, who nevertheless cannot resist becoming enmeshed in self-evidently dubious money-making schemes. The Hawkins sections were written by Twain; these include several humorous sketches. Examples are the steamboat race that leads to a wreck (Chapter IV) and Laura's toying with a clerk in a Washington bookstore (Chapter XXXVI). Notable too is the comic presence throughout the book of the eternally optimistic and eternally broke Micawber-like character, Colonel Beriah Sellers. The character was named Escol Sellers in the first edition and changed to Beriah when an actual George Escol Sellers of Philadelphia objected... Thomas Nast (German: [nast]; September 27, 1840 - December 7, 1902) was a German-born American caricaturist and editorial cartoonist considered to be the "Father of the American Cartoon."