Gilded epigrams galore!

For about a decade now, our merry band has periodically discussed non-LGBTQ literature, a practice we've institutionalized as "Fifth Wednesday" discussions. To maintain the distinction from our bread and butter, I haven't been logging those books in our running list of "Books We Have Read" (at the bottom of the homepage), and have not blogged about them here, either. But I'm going to make an exception to the latter practice for the most recent example of the genre we've discussed: The Gilded Age: A Tale of Today, by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner.

It turns out that the novel wasn't just a collaboration between Twain and Warner. Writing on the Polyglot Vegetarian blog 15 years ago, MMcM (yes, that's his handle) says this:  

There was another co-worker on The Gilded Age before the book was finally completed. This was J. Hammond Trumbull, who prepared the variegated, marvelous cryptographic chapter headings. Trumbull was the most learned man that ever lived in Hartford. He was familiar with all literary and scientific data, and according to Clemens could swear in twenty-seven languages. It was thought to be a choice idea to get Trumbull to supply a lingual medley of quotations to precede the chapters in the new book, the purpose being to excite interest and possibly to amuse the reader—a purpose which to some extent appears to have miscarried.

If that intrigues you as much as it does me, I commend the entire posting to you--and the novel, too.  The five of us who discussed it last month (full disclosure: Yours truly picked it) all saw it as a mixed bag.  Though largely bound by the conventions of 19th-century potboilers, including lots of coincidences and a mad dash to tie up the many loose ends in the final chapters, the book effectively uses humor to break through those norms.