The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, is a political roman a 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-ridden Grant 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, and parvenus, 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 is that 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."
- ISBN10 0195114035
- ISBN13 9780195114034
- Publish Date 6 March 1997 (first published March 1967)
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 17 October 2003
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 51
- Language English