“The Gilded Age” has always been influenced by the work of Edith Wharton. Both the novelist’s oeuvre and the HBO drama are set among the upper echelons of New York society in the late 19th century, documenting frictions both large (the rise of a new ...

W hen Mark Twain coined the term “The Gilded Age,” it wasn’t a compliment, regardless of what the HBO series tries to imply. It was meant to acknowledge the corruption under