"On the Decay of the Art of Lying" is a short essay written by Mark Twain in 1880 for a meeting of the Historical and Antiquarian Club of Hartford, Connecticut. The essay, Twain notes, was "offered for the thirty-dollar prize," but it "did not take the prize." In the essay, Twain laments the four ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's 'most faithful friend'.