The Gilded Age refers the time period after the Civil War to 1900 when the United States economy and cities were rapidly growing. From the outside, it looked like a very positive, productive time period. However, serious social problems and political corruption ran deep below the surface. The term “Gilded Age” was coined by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner. Both wrote a book called The Gilded Age. It exposed many of the wrongdoers of the era. Twain and Dudley believed the Gilded Age was “an era of serious social problems hidden by a thin layer of gold.”
