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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 
America. The 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." Gilding a lily, which is already beautiful and not in need of further 
adornment, 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. 


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Although not one of Twain's more well-known works, it has appeared in more 
than 100 editions since its original publication in 1873. 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. (Description by Wikipedia) 


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Read by Librivox volunteers. Total running time: 17:08:09 


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Cover picture by Joeph Ferdinand Keppler(7885)). Copyright expired in U.S., Canada, EU. 
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in the public domain. 


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The Gilded Age