The Gilded Age: Free Audiobook and Listening Guide

The Gilded Age, credited to Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner, is available as a LibriVox volunteer audiobook. This guide identifies the recording, its source summary and its audio tracks.

About the work

The LibriVox catalogue summary, preserved with the recording, reads:

LibriVox recording of The Gilded Age, by Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner. Read by volunteer readers. The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today is an 1873 novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner that satirizes greed and political corruption in post-Civil War America. The term gilded age, commonly given to the era, comes from the title of this book. Twain and Warner got the name from Shakespeare's King John (1595): "To gild refined gold, to paint the lily... is wasteful and ridiculous excess." Gilding a lily, which is already beautiful and not in need of further adornment, is excessive and wasteful, characteristics of the age Twain and Warner wrote about in their novel. Another interpretation of the title, of course, is the contrast between an ideal "Golden Age," and a less worthy "Gilded Age," as gilding is only a thin layer of gold over baser metal, so the title now takes on a pejorative meaning as to the novel's time, events and people. Although not one of Twain's more well-known works, it has appeared in more than 100 editions since its original publication in 1873. Twain and Warner originally had planned to issue the novel with illustrations by Thomas Nast. The book is remarkable for two reasons–-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. (Description by Wikipedia)

Recording facts

• Recording title: The Gilded Age
• Author credits: Mark Twain & Charles Dudley Warner
• Language: English
• Original MP3 tracks: 64
• Listed recording duration: 17:08:19

Catalogue topics

• satire
• fiction
• greed
• corruption
• materialism

Opening tracks: first 24 of 64

1. 00 - Preface — 3:04
2. 01 - Chapter 1 — 22:39
3. 02 - Chapter 2 — 7:54
4. 03 - Chapter 3 — 9:51
5. 04 - Chapter 4 — 22:30
6. 05 - Chapter 5 — 20:06
7. 06 - Chapter 6 — 24:32
8. 07 - Chapter 7 — 16:44
9. 08 - Chapter 8 — 18:53
10. 09 - Chapter 9 — 13:00
11. 10 - Chapter 10 — 18:52
12. 11 - Chapter 11 — 13:28
13. 12 - Chapter 12 — 16:50
14. 13 - Chapter 13 — 19:05
15. 14 - Chapter 14 — 14:11
16. 15 - Chapter 15 — 18:44
17. 16 - Chapter 16 — 16:15
18. 17 - Chapter 17 — 17:59
19. 18 - Chapter 18 — 18:17
20. 19 - Chapter 19 — 17:11
21. 20 - Chapter 20 — 14:55
22. 21 - Chapter 21 — 15:24
23. 22 - Chapter 22 — 19:38
24. 23 - Chapter 23 — 6:15

Listen to this recording

Open the complete recording and player on Internet Archive. The player includes the full track list and available download formats.

Source and rights

This is a record from LibriVox's official Internet Archive collection, with a public-domain licence recorded in its metadata. LibriVox's policy includes its catalogue summaries as well as its recordings. Its public-domain assessment follows United States law; copyright status can differ elsewhere. The summary and track facts are reproduced and reformatted from that record. Dates attached to the archive upload are not treated as original book publication dates.