• Novels

Graft, Materialism and Corruption in Public Life

The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a 1873 novel by authors Charles Dudley Warner and Mark Twain that satirizes the political corruption of their times. Senator Dilworthy was based on real-life Senator Samuel Pomeroy. Mr Pomeroy, a Republican Senator from of Kansas, was accused of excepting a $7000 bribe in 1873. - AsNotedIn

At a dinner party in late 1872, Mark Twain and his neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, were discussing the sad state of the contemporary American novel. Twain was already well known for his comic essays describing his life as a river boat pilot, an observer during the California gold rush, and a bemused tourist in Europe and the Middle East. Warner was an essayist and newspaper editor who wanted to write fiction. The dinner party discussion prompted Twain and Warner to collaborate on a novel that became The Gilded Age. The novel has appeared in more than 100 editions since its original publication in 1873. 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. Historians have adopted the Gilded Age as a descriptive title for the era. - United States Senate