The Gilded Age

The Gilded Age defines a period in American history of the last quarter of the 19th century. The satirical gilding of the period is not a compliment. Rather, the name is meant to characterize the thinly veiled downside accompanying a time of dominant industrial entrepreneurs, who became incredibly rich and influential while building their steel, oil, and transportation enterprises. Those business successes were accompanied by gross materialism, political corruption, and extreme separations in wealth from the top down. The name The Gilded Age was coined in the book that Mark Twain coauthored with Charles Dudley Warner, entitled “The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today” (1873). The centerpiece scene of this satire is Washington, D.C.

“The Gilded Age” is probably not the best known of Mark Twain’s novels, but it certainly is one that relates very closely to our modern world of disproportionately great wealth accumulated by the relatively few in a digital society. The growth of the digital society today is every bit as dominating in American lives as were the impacts of the steel, oil, and transportation sectors of The Gilded Age of then. Maybe we should think of our own time as The Gilded Age II. The parallels are there. I can almost see Mr. Clemens, all in white, leaning back in his chair, one leg crossed over the other, cigar in hand, smiling for his own prescience of mind.

Another book of the period is Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence” (1920). Its plot time is the 1870s, its venue New York City, the place of the author’s own privileged upbringing. The story is set in that world’s clique of wealth, 5th Avenue mansions, servants, and the expected codes of behavior that strictly dictated the lives of the select, by example the youthful main characters of the novel.

“The Age of Innocence” won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1921, making Wharton the first woman to win that award. She, like pre-Pulitzer Mark Twain, are remembered now as writers of classics in American literature. But, although both “The Age of Innocence” and “The Gilded Age” are written in satirical style, Wharton’s writing style is very much not the writing style of Mark Twain. That might be reason enough to read both books at once or near in time.

I am made to think of a point about the value of reading and exposure from books of varied genre and scope over a lifetime, which is not original with this writer. It is that the values and joys of avidly reading informed and creative writing, both fiction and non-fiction, is to experience widely different styles and perspectives. Twain’s is rich with humor and a mindset born of Hannibal, Missouri and a Tom Sawyer lifestyle, Wharton’s of the New York City wealthy set’s social customs of her own childhood.

Great writing comes from everywhere. Great reading comes with it. And need I say again that all of these joys in life are to be found in public Libraries everywhere. One of them, our own nearby Delmont Public Library, just recently quoted Anna Quindlen (American author, journalist, opinion columnist, and winner in 1992 of the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary) in its weekly e-mail to patrons: “Books are the plane, and the train, and the road. They are the destination, and the journey. They are home.”