CRITICISM

Carter, Paul A. The Spiritual Crisis of the Gilded Age. DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1971, 295 p.

A historical and literary account of the increased skepticism and secularism of the Gilded Age.

Daufenbach, Claus. “‘Corruptionville’: Washington, D. C., and the Portrait of an Era in Mark Twain's The Gilded Age.” In Washington, D. C.: Interdisciplinary Approaches, edited by Lothar Hönnighausen and Andreas Falke, pp. 151-66. Tübingen: Francke Verlag, 1993.

A defense of the historical merit ofThe Gilded Age for representing the artifice and greed of the times.

Dietrichson, Jan W. The Image of Money in the American Novel of the Gilded Age. New York: Humanities Press, 1969, 417 p.

A study of attitudes toward money expressed in Gilded Age-fiction, with special attention paid to William Dean Howells and Henry James.

Rugoff, Milton. America's Gilded Age: Intimate Portraits from an Era of Extravagance and Change, 1850-1890. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1989, 374 p.

Combines biographies of many notable people from the Gilded Age with a more generalizing “social history.”

Sproat, John G. “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, 356 p.

Focuses on the hopeful, yet often ineffective, progressive leaders of the Gilded Age.

Vandersee, Charles. “The Great Literary Mystery of the Gilded Age.” American Literary Realism 7, No. 3 (Summer 1974): 245-72.

Unravels the mystery surrounding a political novel published anonymously in 1883-84 and later attributed to John Milton Hay.

Walker, Robert H. The Poet and the Gilded Age: Social Themes in Nineteenth Century American Verse. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1963, 387 p.

A study of Gilded-Age verse in light of its historical context and important themes of the day.