The complete online text of The Gilded Age by Mark Twain.

An author and platform entertainer who became tremendously popular in his own day, Samuel Clemens participated in the major literary movements of the century and knew virtually every one of his distinguished contemporaries. Biographers have emphasized th...

Mark Twain's work captures the child that lives in the American psyche and also presents the confusions of the American adult. As a mature writer, Twain could recreate the small-town boyhood he had known by the Mississippi River in those halcyon years be...

In the early spring of 1835 John Marshall Clemens and his wife, Jane, loaded up their possessions, their five children, and their single slave in Three Forks, Tennessee, to move to Missouri. It was another in a long series of migrations which the family...

Poland Spring: A Tale of the Gilded Age, 1860-1900. By David L. Richards. Durham and Hanover, N.H.: University of New Hampshire Press and University Press of New England, 2005. χ + 313 pp. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index. Cloth, $45.00. Maine's Poland Spring...

GILDING IS NO LONGER a household word-if it ever was. For most, the term refers to an opulent art form that adds a radiant finish to a museum's finest frames and furniture. For others, it sounds like a stallion that has lost all...