7. Mark Twain gave the era its name, though he borrowed it from Shakespeare
Samuel Clemens was living in Hartford, Connecticut in 1873 when he and a neighbor, Charles Dudley Warner, were teased by their wives into writing a novel which described the era in which they lived. Twain was not ordinarily a collaborationist, but the two responded by producing a novel of which he composed the first eleven chapters and worked with his co-author on several others. At least twelve chapters of the book were written by Warner working alone. The result was a novel which was poorly received by critics who called it disjointed, though its humor was regarded well at the time. The novel was entitled The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today.
Which writer came up with the title is not known definitively, but it is generally attributed to Twain, and it became the name for the era which it partially describes. Its meaning came from the Shakespeare tragedy King John, which describes gilding a lily as “wasteful and ridiculous excess”. The novel was mainly satire, especially in its depictions of the political and social activities of Washington DC at the time it was written, which was during the administration of Ulysses Grant, a longtime friend of Twain’s. Much of what defines the era called the Gilded Age, such as the growth of industry and American imperialism, occurred in the years which followed publication of the novel in 1873, and are not a focus of either the story’s rambling plotlines nor its satirical viewpoint of American society.