Twain wrote The Gilded Age, in collaboration with Charles Dudley Warner, in 1873, so Twain himself did not coin the term to describe the last three decades of the 19th century, as they mostly hadn't yet occurred. His 1873 term Gilded Age was later taken on by others as a way to characterize the end of the nineteenth century in America.
Twain and Warner borrowed the term from Shakespeare's play King John to describe "wasteful and ridiculous excess." The novel pokes fun at the corruption in Washington, D. C. in the post-Civil War era and at the desire of the novel's characters to get rich quick without hard work, primarily by selling land.
The term was later adopted to describe the era because Gilded Age seemed to capture the superficial materialism and greed of the period. It was an era of rapid growth of wealth in the United States: by the turn of the century, the country was poised to become to the world's new superpower. However, it was also a tawdry and corrupt period in which the United States seemed to some to have lost its rugged, pioneer character. Life might have looked golden, but on closer examination, many people believed the gold was shown to be merely gilt, a thin veneer placed over cheaper material.
The word gilded refers to a decorative technique by which one varnishes a given material with a layer of gold. This does not mean that a gilded statue or a gilded mirror frame is made of gold (though it might look like it on first glance)—not if you would look beneath the gilded surface.
The last decades of the 1800s were a period which created a great deal of wealth and money - this was the age of Big Business, and there was a certain glamour in the lives of the super-wealthy, but if you were to look beneath it, you'd see a lot of large-scale exploitation. There was a great deal of poverty, and workers would work for long hours for low pay, often in dangerous conditions—conditions which would spur calls for unionization. (The rise of unions and the use of strikes would create conflict between business interests, often supported by the government, against the working class.) Outward-appearing prosperity concealed a great deal of social and economic turbulence beneath the surface.
The Gilded Age, named by Mark Twain in his book The Gilded Age, A Tale of Today (1873), was a response to the notion of the Golden Age, a term circulated at the time to describe an era of prosperity and economic growth that would follow the Civil War.
Gilding is the practice of covering a metal of lesser value with a thin layer of gold on the outside, obscuring the metal underneath and making the object look as if it is made of gold. In regards to the Gilded Age, the metaphor extends to the deep social problems in the United States in the late nineteenth century that were seemingly veiled by extravagant shows of wealth.
The Gilded Age was spurred by a rapid increase in wealth in the United States caused by the end of the Civil War, expansion of cities and trade, seemingly unlimited resources, and the economic upheaval that came to define the era. At the time, the expansion of the railroads was facilitating trade to areas that were economically inviable before. As a result, cities began to expand, and the railroad model of financing began to work its way into the public arena. Private financial systems, rather than governmental systems, became the norm.
However, the time period also saw a rapid increase in immigration to the United States, followed by xenophobia and vast inequality. The South remained devastated after the Civil War, largely missing out on the Reconstruction Era, and the burgeoning financial system was causing financial and political upheaval during the Panics of 1873 and 1893, giving the age its plain metal inside.
Mark Twain wrote the novel in 1873, but it wasn’t until half a century later that historians would deem this period the Gilded Age. Ultimately, it was the inequality and the indifference of those with wealth that would come to define the time.
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