The Gilded Age - Mark Twain [0]
Title Page
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
A NOTE ON THE TEXT AND ILLUSTRATIONS
EDITOR’S NOTE
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
CHAPTER 47
CHAPTER 48
CHAPTER 49
CHAPTER 50
CHAPTER 51
CHAPTER 52
CHAPTER 53
CHAPTER 54
CHAPTER 55
CHAPTER 56
CHAPTER 57
CHAPTER 58
CHAPTER 59
CHAPTER 60
CHAPTER 61 - Han ager ikke ilde som veed at vende.
CHAPTER 62 - Gedi kanadiben tsannawa.
CHAPTER 63
APPENDIX
NOTES
TRANSLATIONS OF CHAPTER-HEAD MOTTOES
READING GROUP GUIDE
THE MODERN LIBRARY EDITORIAL BOARD
About the Author
Copyright Page
Colonel Sellers Feeding His Family on Expectations.
CHARLES DUDLEY WARNER
Charles Dudley Warner’s literary fame today rests almost entirely on his collaboration with Mark Twain on the novel The Gilded Age (1873). In his own lifetime, Warner was highly respected as a critic and essayist, and only to a lesser degree as a writer of fiction. That said, the highlight of his career came near the end of his life with the production of a trilogy of novels, A Little Journey in the World (1889), The Golden House (1894), and That Fortune (1899), which trace the economic rise and fall of an American everyman.
Warner was born the son of Sylvia Hitchcock and Justus Warner on a farm near Plainfield, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1829. He enjoyed a simple and relatively tranquil early childhood. But at the age of five his father died, and despite his mother’s attempts to keep the family together Warner was sent off three years later to live with a relative in the neighboring town of Charlemont, Massachusetts. By the time Warner had turned twelve, he was reunited with his mother and they, along with Warner’s younger brother, moved to Cazenovia, New York, to live with an uncle on his mother’s side. Soon after, Warner was enrolled in the nearby Oneida Conference Seminary, a renowned Methodist preparatory school. In 1848 he was admitted to Hamilton College as a sophomore and graduated three years later.
After taking employment performing various odd jobs in a bookstore and as a printer, in 1853 Warner joined a railroad surveying expedition to Missouri. Warner had suffered from poor health since childhood and his doctors recommended “outdoor life” as a tonic. After two years out west Warner’s physical condition greatly improved and he returned east in 1855, moved in with an uncle, and prepared to study law. In 1856 he married Susan Lee of New York City, a former classmate at the Methodist seminary. The young couple lived with a friend while Warner studied law at the University of Pennsylvania, taking his LL.B. in 1858. The Warners moved to Chicago for two years, where Charles formed a law practice with a friend. In 1860 Warner moved his family back east to accept the lucrative and influential position of associate editor of the Hartford Evening Press, which in 1867 would merge with the Hartford Courant. Warner assumed full editorial responsibilities for the paper in 1861 after its chief editor joined the Union army at the outbreak of the Civil War.
Once in Hartford, Warner became a close acquaintance of several prominent nineteenth-century American literary figures, including Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. As a neighbor of Twain’s in the city’s Nook Farm Community, their two families grew especially close, and it was through this relationship that the idea for a collaborative novel was born. But The Gilded Age was not Warner’s first book. Three years prior, he collected a number of agricultural essays he had written for the Courant