"The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today" is a novel which satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. The theme of the novel is that the lust for getting rich through land speculation pervades society. The book is remarkable for two reasons â it is the only novel Twain wrote with a collaborator, and its title very quickly became synonymous with graft, materialism, and corruption in public life. The novel gave the era its name: the period of U.S. history from the 1870s to about 1900 is now referred to as the Gilded Age.