Here is a novel so perfectly cynical about American ambition that it named an entire historical era. When Mark Twain teamed with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873, they produced the only novel Twain ever co-wrote, and in doing so, minted a term that still describes our own age of graft, materialism, and political chicanery. The story follows the Hawkins family as they flee the economic doldrums of East Tennessee for the promise of Missouri, but the real action unfolds in Washington D.C., where senators sell votes, speculators pitch impossible railroad schemes, and the hapless but lovable Colonel Sellers hawks everything but his own kitchen sink with unshakable optimism. This is a novel of enormous wheels turning: railroads, land grabs, political machines grinding away at the public purse. Yet for all its cynicism, there's a tender thread in the Hawkins' journey and in Colonel Sellers himself, whose ridiculous schemes stem from genuine hope rather than malice. It endures because Twain saw something in 1873 that we still recognize: the American talent for dressing up greed as ambition and calling it progress.
