Question

Explain the term “The Gilded Age” and tell where it originated.

Answer 1

The "Gilded Age" term came into use in the 1920s and 1930s and was derived from writer Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner's 1873 novel The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, which satirized an era of serious social problems masked by a thin gold gilding.

Answer 2

The Gilded Age, the term for the period of economic boom which began after the American Civil War and ended at the turn of the century was applied to the era by historians in the 1920s, who took the term from one of Mark Twain's lesser-known novels, The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today (1873).