The Gilded Age (1873) (Oxford Mark Twain) [Hardcover]

Mark Twain (Author), Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Series Editor), Ward Just (Introduction), Gregg Camfield (Contributor)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 5, 1996 | Series: Oxford Mark Twain

The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, is a political roman � clef--a direct and caustic attack on government, politicians, and big business in Post-Civil War America. It is the book that gave an era its name. Published in 1873, the first year of the second scandal-ridden Grant administration, it is the first novel of consequence about Washington in all of American writing, as Ward Just notes in his Introduction. The Gilded Age "gives Washington the aspect of a clumsy frontier town of ludicrous aspirations, populated mainly by fools, racketeers, opportunists, and parvenus, most of them members of the United States Congress," Just writes. The Gilded Age trains its satire on corruption in politics, business and the courts; "As Twain famously said, there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress, and the great triumph of The Gilded Age is that we are given chapter and verse on how the thievery is done." Just notes that readers will see for themselves whether Twain and Warner's subtitle for The Gilded Age--"A Tale of To-Day"--is still accurate.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 720 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 5, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0195101340
• ISBN-13: 978-0195101348
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 6.5 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,805,640 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Shelley Fisher Fishkin's broad, interdisciplinary research interests have led her to focus on topics including the ways in which American writers' apprenticeships in journalism shaped their poetry and fiction; the influence of African American voices on canonical American literature; the need to desegregate American literary studies; American theatre history; the development of feminist criticism; the relationship between public history and literary history; literature and animal welfare; and the challenge of doing transnational American Studies. Although much of her work has centered on Mark Twain, she has also published on writers including Gloria Anzaldua, John Dos Passos, Frederick Douglass, Theodore Dreiser, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Erica Jong, Maxine Hong Kingston, Tillie Olsen, and Walt Whitman.

Dr. Fishkin is a Professor of English and Director of the Program in American Studies at Stanford University. After receiving her B.A.from Yale College (summa cum laude, phi beta kappa), she stayed on at Yale for a masters degree in English and a Ph.D. in American Studies, and was Director of the Poynter Fellowship in Journalism there. She taught American Studies and English at the University of Texas from 1985 to 2003, and was Chair of the Department of American Studies. She is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge University, England, where she was a Visiting Fellow, and has twice been a Visiting Scholar at Stanford's Institute for Research on Women and Gender. She has been awarded an American Council of Learned Societies Fellowship, was a Fulbright Distinguished Lecturer in Japan, and was the winner of a Harry H. Ransom Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Texas.

Dr. Fishkin is the author, editor or co-editor of over forty books and has published over eighty articles, essays and reviews. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Georgian, and Italian, and has been published in English-language journals in Turkey, Japan, and Korea. She is the author of: From Fact to Fiction: Journalism and Imaginative Writing in America (winner of a Frank Luther Mott/Kappa Tau Alpha Award for outstanding research in journalism history) (Johns Hopkins, 1985); Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Book" by Choice) (Oxford, 1993); Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (Oxford, 1997), and Feminist Engagements: Forays Into American Literature and Culture (selected as an "Outstanding Academic Title" by Choice) (Palgrave/Macmillan, 2009). She is the editor of the 29-volume Oxford Mark Twain (Oxford, 1996; Paperback reprint edition, 2009), the Oxford Historical Guide to Mark Twain (Oxford, 2002), "Is He Dead?" A New Comedy by Mark Twain (University of California, 2003), Mark Twain's Book of Animals (Univerisity of California Press, 2009), and The Mark Twain Anthology: Great Writers on his LIfe and Work (Library of America, 2010). She is also a producer of the adaptation of Twain's "Is He Dead?" which had its world debut on Broadway at the Lyceum Theatre in 2007, and was nominated for a Tony Award. She is the co-editor of Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (Oxford, 1994); People of the Book: Thirty Scholars Reflect on Their Jewish Identity (Wisconsin, 1996); The Encyclopedia of Civil Rights in America (M.E. Sharpe, 1997); Mark Twain at the Turn of the Century, 1890-1910 (Arizona Quarterly, 2005); 'Sport of the Gods' and Other Essential Writing by Paul Laurence Dunbar (Random House, 2005), Anthology of American Literature, ninth edition (Prentice-Hall, 2006), Concise Anthology of American Literature, seventh edition (Prentice-Hall, 2010), and a special issue of African American Review devoted to the work of Paul Laurence Dunbar (autumn 2007). From 1993 to 2003 she co-edited Oxford University Press's "Race and American Culture" book series with Arnold Rampersad. She was co-founder of the Charlotte Perkins Gilman society, and has been president of the Mark Twain Circle of America and chair of the MLA Nonfiction Prose Division. She recently finished a term as President of the American Studies Association, and gave keynote talks during the last five years at national American Studies conferences in China, Denmark, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Russia, Taiwan, the United Kingdom, and the U.S. Her research has been featured twice on the front page of the New York Times, and in 2009 she was awarded the Mark Twain Circle's Certificate of Merit "for long and distinguished service in the elucidation of the work, thought, life and art of Mark Twain." She is t a member of the Board of Governors of the Humanities Research Institute of the University of California, and is a founding Editor of the new online Journal of Transnational American Studies [see http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/march11/fishkin-publishes-american-studies-journal-030409.html and http://humanexperience.stanford.edu/twainanimals].

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars His first novel and a weaker co-author = not the greatest, August 24, 2011

By 

Herbert Powell (Detroit) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gilded Age (1873) (Oxford Mark Twain) (Hardcover)

I don't know if Amazon is lumping together the reviews of all the different editions for this book, but just in case, I read the Oxford edition, which is a beautiful hardcover facsimile of the first edition. I highly recommend those editions for any Twain work (the Library of America editions are also great). Anyway, being the first edition, there were a few typos here and there- missing punctuation or (this one happens several times) a question mark where a period or exclamation point was intended.

I know it's cliche to say "I love most Twain, but...", especially after only having read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, but I have to say it. At least in my defense I've read quite a bit of Twain: Tom Sawyer Abroad/Detective, What is Man?, Punch, Brothers, Punch, all the McWilliams' adventures, you get the idea. I like it all, and I started this book convinced that I would like it too. It starts out well- later I found out that Twain wrote the first 11 chapters- and there are parts throughout that are funny, brutally satirical, and engaging. There are also plenty of soap opera-ish, for lack of a better phrase, tedious, and unnecessarily long parts. I want to reiterate the "soap opera" aspect because the love stories, which I completely lost track of due to lack of giving a #@!$, were painful to wade through. It's not fair to put too much blame on Warner, but his chapters are for the most part noticeably worse than Twain's. A good amount of the book could have been shaved off too, which would have improved it quite a bit (my edition is 575 pages).

I'm probably focusing too much on the negatives, especially because I have the advantage of knowing what a world class satirist Twain would become. This novel was only his beginning, but I have the luxury of comparing it to Letters From the Earth and his later works. Overall, despite its occasional charms, it just never really came together. I'd give it 3 1/2 stars if I could.