Gilded Age Essay Examples

c. 1871 - c. 1880

United States

Gilded Age was a period of gross materialism and blatant political corruption in U.S. history during the 1870s that gave rise to important novels of social and political criticism.

The Gilded Age took its name from the novel The Gilded Age, written by Mark Twain in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner and published in 1873. By this name, Mark Twain meant that the period was glittering on the surface but corrupt underneath.

Among the best known of the entrepreneurs who became known, pejoratively, as robber barons during the Gilded Age were John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, Cornelius Vanderbilt, Leland Stanford, and J.P. Morgan.