It began as a dinner-party contest: when Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner criticized the deplorable quality of their wives' reading material, the two writers were challenged to come up with something more intriguing. Thus, for the only time in his career, Twain collaborated on a novel with another author. The title of their rollicking 1873 tale became synonymous with the rampant post–Civil War corruption of Washington, D.C., where crooked politicians and greedy speculators vied with bankers and industrialists to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class. Praised by historian Gary Wills as "our best political novel," The Gilded Age was among the first major American books to satirize the graft, materialism, and breakdown of public life. The subtitle, A Tale of Today, remains an accurate description of a declining democracy, in which enormous strides in industry and technology enrich only a tiny percentage of the population.
Books for All Kinds of Readers Read HowYouWant offers the widest selection of on-demand, accessible format editions on the market today. Our 7 different sizes of EasyRead are optimized by...
**** New edition (an earlier version is cited in BCL3). Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR
First published in 1873, The Gilded Age is both a biting satire and a revealing portrait of post-Civil War America-an age of corruption when crooked land speculators, ruthless bankers, and dishonest politicians voraciously took advantage of ...
Broad in scope, The Gilded Age brings together sixteen original essays that offer lively syntheses of modern scholarship while making their own interpretive arguments.
Author Esther Crain, the go-to authority on the era, weaves first-hand accounts and fascinating details into a vivid tapestry of American society at the turn of the century.
Led by Thomas W. Lamont, the senior partner of the House of Morgan, a pool of six bankers was formed to save the ... Altogether, 16,410,030 sales took place and the Times averages fell 43 points, wiping out all the gains of the previous ...
The single, definitive resource for the latest state of knowledge relating to the history and historiography of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era Features contributions by leading scholars in a wide range of relevant specialties Coverage ...
Bestselling author and historian Alan Axelrod tackles this subject in a fresh way, exploring this intense era in its various dimensions, and looking at also looks at how it presaged our current era, which many are calling the “Second ...
Broad in scope, The Gilded Age consists of 14 original essays, each written by an expert in the field. Topics have been selected so that students can appreciate the various...
Richardson, 41–52; Foner, 275–80, 307–9; Valelly, 3; Downs, After Appomattox, 162–65, 168–74, 178. 46. Downs, After Appomattox, 193, 195; Trefousse, 264–65; Hahn, 177–89; Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation ...