As Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens straddled the conflicts between culture and commerce that characterized the era he named the Gilded Age. In "Littery Man", Richard Lowry examines how Twain used these conflicts in his major texts to fashion an "autobiography of authorship," a narrative of his own claims to literary authority at that moment when the American Writer emerged as a profession. Drawing on wide range of cultural genres--popular boys' fiction, childbearing manuals, travel narratives, autobiography, and criticism and fiction of the period--Lowry reconstructs how...

Between the frequently recounted events of the Gold Rush and the Great Depression stretches a period of California history that is equally crucial but less often acknowledged. In his fresh, synthetic consideration of these in-between years, George L. Henderson points specifically to the take-off of California's rural juggernaut between the 1880s and middle 1920s--the upward spiral of city bids for country dollars and rural bids for urban investments. These decades were salve for mining's risky finances yet groundwork for the chaotic 1930s. Moreover, Henderson argues that much like the two...