One gilds things to make them look better than they really are. Mark Twain, the same writer who turned a skeptical eye to the ostensible advancements made with the post-Civil War urbanization of America, had first focused on those pretensions attendant to the striving for and accumulation of wealth by the very few for the very few. Those in power, the wealthy few, the turn of that century’s 2%, the self-proclaimed elite, sought to title their time as being an American Golden Age, an age when the right people enjoyed the bounty of a Calvinist god, who, as far as they were concerned, finally got it right. Mark Twain saw through the pretense and laughed, and his target is equally those who’ve arrived, as well as those who want to arrive, the ones who feel the need to mimic the greats, all the while mistaking arrogance for class. Written with Charles Duncan Warren, Twain’s Hartford neighbor and friend, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873) is Twain’s only collaborative work. Its title soon became synonymous with greed, graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. The benefit for us is that Twain, a master, used satire and humor to pull back the outer pretense and falsehoods, the gilded superficial surface, to lay bare the sad remnant underneath the shiny surface – human beings, flawed, greedy, fearful, and ultimately comical, though without any intention to be thought of as such. (Summary by Michael Hogan)

Play sample: 

Download a PDF datasheet