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The Hawkins family of Tennessee owns seventy-five thousand acres of wild land that the father believes will one day make them rich, and they move to Missouri…
The Hawkins family of Tennessee owns seventy-five thousand acres of wild land that the father believes will one day make them rich, and they move to Missouri full of hope. Years later the land is still unsold, and the family's dreams are kept alive by the irrepressible Colonel Sellers, who sees a fortune in every scheme. The beautiful Laura Hawkins goes to Washington as a lobbyist and charms congressmen into supporting a corrupt land bill, while a crooked senator, railway promoters and speculators show how money and politics have become one.
Context and significance
Mark Twain wrote the novel in 1873 with his neighbour Charles Dudley Warner, and its title gave a name to the whole era of American history that followed, an age of glittering wealth over corruption. It was Twain's first novel. His later, darker satire is The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson.
About the author
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.