What a wee little part of a person’s life are his acts and his words! His real life is led in his head, and is known to none but himself. All day long, and every day, the mill of his brain is grinding, and his thoughts, (which are but the mute articulation of his feelings,) not those other things, are his history. His acts and words are merely the visible thin crust of his world, with its scattered snow summits and its vacant wastes of water—and they are so trifling a part of his bulk! a mere skin enveloping it. The mass of him is hidden—it and its volcanic fires that toss and boil, and never rest, night or day. These are his life, and they are not written, and cannot be written. Every day would make a whole book of eighty thousand words—three hundred and sixty-five books a year. Biographies are but the clothes and buttons of the man—the biography of the man himself cannot be written.
To sample Mark Twain’s & Charles Dudley Warner’s novel, see archive.org, which makes reading online almost pleasant. (The editor of Gutenberg.org’s e-text edition, David Widger, can tell you which of the chapters Twain wrote here.)
On the politics of the “New Gilded Age,” see Larry Bartels’s Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age(2008); here’s an interview on PBS. Barack Obama was apparently reading it in the fall of 2008. For historians’ commentary, see Bill Moyers’s interviews with Steve Fraser & Nell Painter and Niall Ferguson’s column about “Wall Street’s New Gilded Age.” The search query “New Golden Age” on the New York Timeswebsite brings up 69 hits since 1981; a few are from the 1980s, more are from the 1990s, most are since 2000. Robert Frank comments about one of those NYT articles in the Wall Street Journal, noting that “the original titans towered over today’s rich — both in wealth and philanthropy.” He was most impressed with this interactive graphic, which ranks American tycoons by their wealth as a percentage of the overall US economy. Standard Oil founder John D. Rockefeller tops the list. From our own era, only Bill Gates, Sam Walton, and Warren Buffett make the list.
