“The Gilded Age is a severe, truthful and painful satire...there is abundance of humor scattered through it. New York World, 1874
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era that followed the Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the time is exemplified through two fictional narratives: one, of the Hawkinses, a poor family from Tennessee that tries to persuade the government to purchase their seventy-five thousand acres of unimproved land; and second, of Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, two young upper-class men who seek their fortune in land as well.
This book is widely considered one of the hundred greatest books of all time and is here to attract a whole new generation of readers, for the themes of this classic work are still relevant to our nation today.
Praise
“The Gilded Age is a severe, truthful and painful satire...there is abundance of humor scattered through it. New York World, 1874
“It is decidedly original...the most entertaining book of the season.” Hartford Times, 1873
Details
More Information
Language
English
Release Day
Apr 25, 2011
Release Date
April 26, 2011
Release Date Machine
1303776000
Imprint
Blackstone Publishing
Provider
Craig Black
Categories
Literature & Fiction, Classics, Classics, Evergreen Classics, Evergreen Classics, Classics, Fiction - All, Fiction - Adult
Mark Twain, pseudonym of Samuel L. Clemens (1835–1910), was born in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the west bank of the Mississippi River. He attended school briefly and then at age thirteen became a full-time apprentice to a local printer. When his older brother Orion established the Hannibal Journal, Samuel became a compositor for that paper and then, for a time, an itinerant printer. With a commission to write comic travel letters, he traveled down the Mississippi. Smitten with the riverboat life, he signed on as an apprentice to a steamboat pilot. After 1859, he became a licensed pilot, but two years later the Civil War put an end to the steam-boat traffic.
In 1861, he and his brother traveled to the Nevada Territory where Samuel became a writer for the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, and there, on February 3, 1863, he signed a humorous account with the pseudonym Mark Twain. The name was a river man’s term for water “two fathoms deep” and thus just barely safe for navigation.
In 1870 Twain married and moved with his wife to Hartford, Connecticut. He became a highly successful lecturer in the United States and England, and he continued to write.
Charles Dudley Warner (1829–1900), an American essayist and novelist, was born of Puritan ancestry. He traveled widely, lectured frequently, and was actively interested in prison reform, city park supervision, and other movements for the public good. He was the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and is coauthor, with Mark Twain, of The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
Bronson Pinchot, Audible’s Narrator of the Year for 2010, has won Publishers Weekly Listen-Up Awards, AudioFile Earphones Awards, Audible’s Book of the Year Award, and Audie Awards for several audiobooks, including Matterhorn, Wise Blood, Occupied City, and The Learners. A magna cum laude graduate of Yale, he is an Emmy- and People’s Choice-nominated veteran of movies, television, and Broadway and West End shows. His performance of Malvolio in Twelfth Night was named the highlight of the entire two-year Kennedy Center Shakespeare Festival by the Washington Post. He attended the acting programs at Shakespeare & Company and Circle-in-the-Square, logged in well over 200 episodes of television, starred or costarred in a bouquet of films, plays, musicals, and Shakespeare on Broadway and in London, and developed a passion for Greek revival architecture.
Overview
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is the collaborative work of Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirized the era that followed the Civil War. This period is often referred to as "The Gilded Age" because of this book. The corruption and greed that was typical of the time is exemplified through two fictional narratives: one, of the Hawkinses, a poor family from Tennessee that tries to persuade the government to purchase their seventy-five thousand acres of unimproved land; and second, of Philip Sterling and Henry Brierly, two young upper-class men who seek their fortune in land as well.
This book is widely considered one of the hundred greatest books of all time and is here to attract a whole new generation of readers, for the themes of this classic work are still relevant to our nation today.