Born in Massachusetts and raised there and in western New York, Charles Dudley Warner graduated from Hamilton College in 1851. After working as a railway surveyor in Missouri (1853–54), he earned a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania (1858). He practiced law in Chicago for two years before joining his friend Joseph R. Hawley on the Hartford, Connecticut, Evening Press, which merged with the Hartford Courant in 1867. Warner was manager of or contributor to the newspaper for the next thirty-three years, while continuing to publish essays, travel books, and novels (his least successful genre). Warner and his wife, Susan, were early settlers in the Nook Farm neighborhood of Hartford. After the Clemens family moved there in 1871, Warner and SLC became friends, and collaborated on The Gilded Age (1873–74). It is for his share in this book, the first novel by either writer, that Warner is now best remembered.