Download or read book The Gilded Age written by Mark Twain and published by Ezreads Publications Llc. This book was released on 2009-03 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. The term gilded age, commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595): "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess. Illustrated.