The gilded age, p.52
The Gilded Age,
p.52
Charles Johnson
Jon Krakauer
Edmund Morris
Azar Nafisi
Joyce Carol Oates
Elaine Pagels
John Richardson
Salman Rushdie
Oliver Sacks
Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.
Carolyn See
William Styron
Gore Vidal
1 The incidents of the explosion are not invented. They happened just as they are told.— THE AUTHORS.
2 In those old days the average man called his children after his most revered literary and historical idols; consequently there was hardly a family, at least in the West, but had a Washington in it—and also a Lafayette, a Franklin, and six or eight sounding names from Byron, Scott, and the Bible, if the offspring held out. To visit such a family, was to find one’s self confronted by a congress made up of representatives of the imperial myths and the majestic dead of all the ages. There was something thrilling about it, to a stranger, not to say awe inspiring.
3 As impossible and exasperating as this conversation may sound to a person who is not an idiot, it is scarcely in any respect an exaggeration of one which one of us actually listened to in an American drawing room—otherwise we could not venture to put such a chapter into a book which professes to deal with social possibilities.—THE AUTHORS.
4 Her private figure of speech for Brother—or Son-in-law.
5 The $7,000 left by Mr. Noble with his state legislature was placed in safe keeping to await the claim of the legitimate owner. Senator Dilworthy made one little effort through his protégé the embryo banker to recover it, but there being no notes of hand or other memoranda to support the claim, it failed. The moral of which is, that when one loans money to start a bank with, one ought to take the party’s written acknowledgment of the fact.
6 The translations of the chapter-head mottoes were prepared in 1899 by J. Hammond Trumbull, eminent historian and Hartford neighbor of Samuel Clemens and Charles Dudley Warner, for the first authorized uniform edition of Mark Twain’s writings. Trumbull originally supplied Clemens and Warner with the mottoes for the first edition of The Gilded Age in 1873. The source for the translations printed here is the 1915 text of The Gilded Age published by Grosset & Dunlap. Editors of the Modern Library Classics series have corrected some of the original page references and chapter numbers in the translations to match those of the current volume.
MARK TWAIN
Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri. His family moved to the Mississippi River port town of Hannibal four years later. His father—who failed as a storekeeper, worked as a clerk, and was finally appointed justice of the peace—died when Sam was eleven. Soon afterward the boy began working as an apprentice printer, and by age sixteen he was occasionally writing newspaper sketches. He left Hannibal at eighteen to work as an itinerant printer in New York, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. From 1857 to 1861 he worked on Mississippi River steamboats, advancing from cub pilot to licensed pilot.
When the Civil War interrupted river traffic, Sam headed west with his brother Orion, who had been appointed secretary of the Nevada Territory. Settling at first in Carson City, he left his brother’s employ and tried his luck at prospecting at various mining sites. He was unsuccessful at mining, but his humorous contributions to various regional periodicals attracted notice, and in September 1862 he accepted an offer of employment on the Virginia City Territorial Enterprise, soon to be one of the West’s outstanding newspapers. There he came under the influence of Sagebrush School writers, especially Joseph T. Goodman and Dan De Quille, and his writing career began.
At first he adopted the pen name of Josh, but in January 1863 he changed it to Mark Twain, originally a river term indicating safe water. He left Virginia City in May 1864 for San Francisco, from where he continued to send columns to the Enterprise, but he also wrote for several local newspapers, including the San Francisco Call, the Alta California, and the Sacramento Union. The Union sent him on a five-month trip to the Sandwich Islands (Hawaii) in 1866, from which he wrote articles that were soon adapted for a lecture tour that began on his return, and later for chapters of Roughing It. The Alta California paid for his passage in 1867 on an organized tour of Europe and the Near East. His growing fame as a humorous writer and lecturer was enhanced by The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and Other Sketches (1867).
After his marriage to Olivia Louis (Livy) Langdon in 1870, Twain settled first in Buffalo, New York, and then for two decades in Hartford, Connecticut. His newspaper sketches from his European trip were expanded into The Innocents Abroad (1869), and his Western and Sandwich Island adventures were transformed into Roughing It (1872), both financial successes. The Gilded Age, written in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, followed in 1873. Twain subsequently mined his childhood experiences for three of his masterpieces: The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), Life on the Mississippi (1883), and, finally, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884–85), on which he worked for nearly a decade. Another vein, historical fiction, resulted in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), and Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896). He continued his interest in travel writing with A Tramp Abroad (1880) and Following the Equator (1897). Literary associates during these years included such eminent authors as Bret Harte, George Washington Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, and the most important and long-lasting of them all, William Dean Howells.
During these years, Twain embarked on numerous business ventures, most of them unsuccessful. A notable exception was his undertaking to publish the memoirs of the terminally ill Ulysses S. Grant in 1885, but this was more than balanced by his typical experiences. His most disastrous investment was in a typesetting machine designed by James W. Paige. Twain lost a fortune in that project, and its failure contributed to his declaration of bankruptcy in 1894.
Despite his public image as a humorist and the genial author of seemingly heartwarming tales of an idyllic American boyhood, Twain was at heart a serious and even gloomy thinker, particularly about religion. Even as early as Roughing It, but certainly from Huckleberry Finn onward, it is possible to find evidences in his writings of deepening pessimism increasingly thinly concealed by irony. The deaths of two of his daughters, Susy and Jean, added to the bitterness of his reflections. His novel The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson (1894), an indictment of slavery, was not artistically successful, and his late works, such as “To the Person Sitting in Darkness” (1901), “The War Prayer” (1905), and “King Leopold’s Soliloquy” (1905) are overtly critical of imperialism and colonialism. The privately published What Is Man? (1906) is an extremely bleak expression of determinism, and the posthumously published Mysterious Stranger fragments and Letters from the Earth, both criticisms of religious teachings, are among the darkest things he wrote. In his last years, his financial troubles finally resolved, but alone except for his daughter Clara, Twain settled near Redding, Connecticut, and died in his mansion, Stormfield, on April 21, 1910.
2006 Modern Library Paperback Edition
Introduction copyright © 2006 by Ron Powers
Mark Twain biographical note copyright © 1993 by Random House, Inc.
Charles Dudley Warner biographical note copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.
Notes and Reading Group Guide copyright © 2006 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Twain, Mark 1835–1910.
The Gilded Age / Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner; introduction by Ron Powers;
notes by Joseph Csicsila; selected illustrations by Augustus Hoppin . . . [et al.].
p. cm. — (Modern Library classics)
1. Political corruption—Fiction. 2. Washington (D.C.)—Fiction. 3. Legislators—Fiction.
4. Speculation—Fiction. 5. Businessmen—Fiction. I. Warner, Charles Dudley, 1829–1900.
II. Hoppin, Augustus, 1828–1896. III. Title. IV. Series.
PS1311.A1 2006
813’.4—dc22 200505438
www.modernlibrary.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-43226-1
v3.0
Mark Twain, The Gilded Age
