ABSTRACT
Samuel L. Clemens (1835-1910), “Mark Twain,” although frequently identified as a southwestern or western writer representing the frontier spirit, shows the characteristics of the northeastern literary humorists in these burlesque treatments of social and personal interests ap proached through the medium of national political rhetoric. The Gilded Age (1873), written with the Hartford humorist Charles Dud ley Warner, extended the fictionalization of shoddy personal interests, allowing Twain to describe corporate, governmental, and religious de ficiencies in comic moments and rhetorical irony close to the pieces published in the late 1860s.
