<Tr> <Th> Pages </Th> <Td> 630 </Td> </Tr> <P> The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first published in 1873 . It satirizes greed and political corruption in post--Civil War America . Although not one of Twain's best - known works, it has appeared in more than one hundred editions since its original publication . Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast . 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 . The novel gave the era its name: the period of US history from the 1870s to about 1900 is now referred to as the Gilded Age . </P> <P> Charles Dudley Warner, a writer and editor, was a neighbor and good friend of Mark Twain in Hartford, Connecticut . According to Twain's biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, their wives challenged Twain and Warner at dinner to write a better novel than what they were used to reading . Twain wrote the first eleven chapters, followed by twelve chapters written by Warner . Most of the remaining chapters were also written by only one of them, but the concluding chapters were attributed to joint authorship . The entire novel was completed between February and April 1873 . </P> <P> Contemporary critics, while praising its humor and satire, did not consider the collaboration a success because the independent stories written by each author did not mesh well . A review published in 1874 compared the novel to a badly - mixed salad dressing, in which "the ingredients are capital, the use of them faulty ." </P>

The gilded age a tale of today sparknotes