In the early 1870s, Mark Twain, along with his friend and neighbor Charles Dudley Warner -- who had chided their wives for the low quality novels they were reading -- were challenged by them to write something better.
Twain, who would eventually attain to worldwide fame for his novels "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" and "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" had never before written a novel; the collaboration here exposed political corruption of the day and gave the era an enduring name, that of this novel: The Gilded Age.
The Gilded Age examines the greed and corruption rampant in America at that time, from wild speculations by frontier megalomaniacs to shady intrigues by Washington politicians, even including the murder of a bigamist by a sexy lobbyist whom he had earlier led astray and betrayed, and relates how many women of the time wanted to change genders.
Almost twenty years later, Twain (by himself, this time) wrote a sequel, "The American Claimant" which is possibly his most wildly inventive and wacky novel of all, and incorporates one-armed cowboys, mad scientists, and armies of zombies mobilized to provide cheap labor to speculators.
These two novels are combined here in one volume.