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Mark Twain

The American author Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835-1910), better known as Mark Twain is one of the most widely loved and celebrated American writers since his first books were released in the late 1860s, early 1870s. Twain become an icon of American culture and humor all over the world with the publication of his great works. Under the pen name Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens published over 30 works of literature- encompassing satire, historical fiction, short stories, and nonfiction. Many of his writings have reached the pinnacles of American and world literature, including the timeless Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court. Besides these easily recognizable classics, Twain wrote five fascinating Travelogues, detailing his experiences in the western U.S., along the Mississippi, in Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. A detailed history of Joan of Arc, Excerpts From the Personal Diaries of Adam and Eve, and Letters from Satan's visit to earth are the lesser known works in Twains catalogue.
The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner satirizing 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.”Gilding a lily, which is already beautiful and not in need of further adornment, is excessive and wasteful, characteristics of the age Twain and Warner wrote about in their novel. The novel has appeared in more than 100 editions since its original publication in 1873. . 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.
A Connecticut Yankee In King Arthur’s Court...