Gilded Age, The: A Tale of Today (Signet Classic)

Mark Twain; Charles Dudley Warner

ISBN 10: 0451004728 / ISBN 13: 9780451004727

Published by NAL Signet Classics, 1969

About this Item

Readable copy. Pages may have considerable notes/highlighting. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less.

Seller Inventory # G0451004728I5N00

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Gilded Age, The: A Tale of Today (Signet Classic)
• Publisher: NAL Signet Classics
• Publication Date: 1969
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0451004728
• ISBN 13: 9780451004727
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition: 5th or later Edition
• Condition: Fair
• Dust Jacket Condition: No Jacket
• Weight: 0.64 pounds

About this title

Synopsis

Arguably the first major American novel to satirize the political milieu of Washington, D.C. and the wild speculation schemes that exploded across the nation in the years that followed the Civil War, The Gilded Age gave this remarkable era its name. Co-written by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, this rollicking novel is rife with unscrupulous politicians, colorful plutocrats, and blindly optimistic speculators caught up in a frenzy of romance, murder, and surefire deals gone bust. First published in 1873 and filled with unforgettable characters such as the vainglorious Colonel Sellers and the ruthless Senator Dilsworthy, The Gilded Age is a hilarious and instructive lesson in American history.

About the Author

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”