The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner, 1873

Washington, DC

I'm re-reading Mark Twain's 1873 "The Gilded Age: a Tale of Today" for a lecture I'm giving. What strikes me--again--is that this book not only coined a name for one of the most important socio-economic moments in America's history (1865-1915), but it is a bitingly accurate portrait of what America was as it became a great nation in the 19th century. This was the country where you could re-invent yourself, by any means necessary. The second thing that strikes me is how like this old vision of the United States we are today. We are still a nation of self-re-inventors, of dreamers. We are easily corrupted by our dreams and led astray by those who feed our fantasies of success.

Ulysses