Charles Dudley Warner

It began as a dinner-party contest: when Mark Twain and his neighbor Charles Dudley Warner criticized the deplorable quality of their wives' reading material, the two writers were challenged to come up with something more intriguing. Thus, for the only time in his career, Twain collaborated on a novel with another author. The title of their rollicking 1873 tale became synonymous with the rampant post—Civil War corruption of Washington, D.C., where...