Life in the Gilded Age



Introduction

The Gilded Age: A Tale of today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War United States. Another interpretation of the title, of course, is the contrast between an ideal "Gilded Age", and less worthy "Gilded Age", as gold is only a thin layer of gold on the lower metal, so the title becomes now a pejorative meaning in time of the novel, events and people. (Winkler, pp. 14-19)

The novel is primarily concerned with the efforts of a poor family in New York to ...