In addition to being a writer, Mark Twain was a businessman, although almost always a failure. He was an inventor who tried to market his ideas, with mixed results. He founded his own publishing company when he grew tired of dealing with publishers, and for a time he was successful, although that too ended in bankruptcy. Like others in the Gilded Age, which he named, he was an investor, again with mixed and finally disastrous results. Although he criticized his age as one of monetary grasping, he himself was fully inculcated in his age. He lived in an age of great economic change, and his works reflect a tortured relationship with money and economics.