Mark Twain

The Gilded Age Mark Twain Illustrated First edition

A nice version with 220 original illustrations from the first edition.

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 100 editions since its original publication. 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. Although more than a century has passed since its publication, the novel's satirical observations of political and social life in Washington, D. C. are still pertinent.