It began as a dinner-party contest: when Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner criticised the deplorable quality of their wives' reading material, the two writers were challenged to come up with something more intriguing. Thus, for the only time in his career, Twain collaborated on a novel with another author. The title of their rollicking 1873 tale became synonymous with the rampant post Civil War corruption of Washington, D.C., where crooked politicians and greedy speculators vied with bankers and industrialists to enrich themselves at the expense of the working class. Praised by historian Gary Wills as "our best political novel," The Gilded Age was among the first major American books to satirise the graft, materialism, and breakdown of public life. The subtitle, A Tale of Today, remains an accurate description of a declining democracy, in which enormous strides in industry and technology enrich only a tiny percentage of the population. AUTHORS: After the Civil War, Samuel Clemens (1835 1910) left his small town to seek work as a riverboat pilot. As Mark Twain, the Missouri native found his place in the world. Author, journalist, lecturer, wit, and sage, Twain created enduring works that have enlightened and amused readers of all ages for generations. Essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner (1829 1900) was the editor of Connecticut's The Hartford Press and a columnist for Harper's Magazine. He was the first president of the National Institute of Arts and Letters and president of the American Social Science Association.