"The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873)"

[Wry Catcher]

"A novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, which explores political and economic corruption in the United States. The central characters, Colonel Beriah Sellers and Senator Abner Dilworthy, are tied together in a government railroad bribery scheme. Twain and Warner depict an American society that, despite its appearance of promise and prosperity, is riddled with corruption and scandal."

"Two general themes caused tension during the Gilded Age:

1. Laissez-faire: a doctrine opposing government interference in economic affairs beyond the minimum necessary for the maintenance of peace and property rights." Source: Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary (1990).
2. Concentration of power in the hands of the government at all levels - local, state, and federal. Government during this period assumed more authority and power, especially expanding its bureaucratic control and authority. Major areas of expansion of government power included land policy, railroad subsidies, tax/tariff policy, immigration policy, and Indian policy."

For more history, please see this link:
H102 Lecture 04: The Gilded Age and the Politics of Corruption

 

[Baruch Menachem]

Mark's best stuff was his reporting. Innocents Abroad is still a fun read.

His single best effort was in A tramp Abroad, where he eviscerates the German language.

Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless, and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it, hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over the page and reads, "Let the pupil make careful note of the following exceptions." He runs his eye down and finds that there are more exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again, to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been, and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one of these four confusing "cases" where I am master of it, a seemingly insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird -- (it is always inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody): "Where is the bird?" Now the answer to this question -- according to the book -- is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I say to myself, "Regen (rain) is masculine -- or maybe it is feminine -- or possibly neuter -- it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it is either der (the) Regen, or die (the) Regen, or das (the) Regen, according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is masculine. Very well -- then the rain is der Regen, if it is simply in the quiescent state of being mentioned, without enlargement or discussion -- Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is doing something -- that is, resting (which is one of the German grammar's ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative case, and makes it dem Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is doing something actively, -- it is falling -- to interfere with the bird, likely -- and this indicates movement, which has the effect of sliding it into the Accusative case and changing dem Regen into den Regen." Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the blacksmith shop "wegen (on account of) den Regen." Then the teacher lets me softly down with the remark that whenever the word "wegen" drops into a sentence, it always throws that subject into the Genitive case, regardless of consequences -- and that therefore this bird stayed in the blacksmith shop "wegen des Regens."

Russian is worse. They have six cases

 

[editec]

Huck Finn is probably his master opus.

Here is the online audio version.

If you haven't read or at least listened to this book, you really are missing one of the quientessentially AMERICAN masterpieces.

 

[Baruch Menachem]

good story. too bad he pulled his punches as the end.

It should have ended where the Duke and Dauphin get rode out of town on the rail, but he had to make a happy ending.

Wry Catcher reminds me a bit of old man Finn

 

[JakeStarkey]

I have read Huck Finn twice a year for decades. In my humble opinion, one does not understand America without understanding baseball and "the River and a Boy".