description: The Gilded Age , by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, is a political roman à clef --a direct and caustic attack on government, politicians, and big business in Post-Civil War America. It is the book that gave an era its name. Published in 1873, the first year of the second scandal-riddenGrant administration, it is the first novel of consequence about Washington in all of American writing, as Ward Just notes in his Introduction. The Gilded Age "gives Washington the aspect of a clumsy frontier town of ludicrous aspirations, populated mainly by fools, racketeers, opportunists, andparvenus, most of them members of the United States Congress," Just writes. The Gilded Age trains its satire on corruption in politics, business and the courts; "As Twain famously said, there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress, and the great triumph of The Gilded Age isthat we are given chapter and verse on how the thievery is done." Just notes that readers will see for themselves whether Twain and Warner's subtitle for The Gilded Age --"A Tale of To-Day"--is still accurate.
language: English
title: The Gilded Age (1873)
titlecomplete: The Gilded Age (1873) (The Oxford Mark Twain)
genres: Fiction, American, Politics, Classic Literature, Humor, Literature, Classics, Novels, 19th Century, Historical Fiction
ratings_count: 1491
places: Washington, D.C., Tennessee
publisher: Oxford University Press