Charles Dudley Warner

The gilded age Charles Dudley Warner

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first published in 1873. It satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America in the era now referred to as the Gilded Age. Although not one of Twain's best-known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication. 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. Charles Dudley Warner, a writer and editor, was a neighbor and good friend of Mark Twain in Hartford, Connecticut. According to Twain's biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, their wives challenged Twain and Warner at dinner to write a better novel than what they were used to reading. Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, followed by twelve chapters written by Warner. Most of the remaining chapters were also written by only one of them, but the concluding chapters were attributed to joint authorship. The entire novel was completed between February and April 1873