"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. Twain published the text in The Stolen White Elephant Etc. (1882).
In the essay, Twain laments the four ways in which men of America's Gilded Age employ man's "most faithful friend". He concludes by insisting that:
The essay, Twain notes, was "offered for the thirty-dollar prize", but it "did not take the prize".