A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is Mark Twain's most ambitious work: one of the greatest satires in American literature, a tour-de-force with a science-fiction plot; (one of the first works to feature time travel), told in the witty slang of a Hartford Connecticut workingman.

It begins when Hank Morgan, an expert mechanic in a nineteenth-century New England arms factory, is hit on the head during a fight and awakens to find himself among the knights and magicians of King Arthur’s Camelot. He vows to "boss the whole country inside of three weeks," and embarks on a revolutionary plan to modernize Camelot with 19th century industrial inventions like electricity and gunfire. And so he does. Emerging as "The Boss," he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, inventing the printing press, constructing telephone lines, and publishing England’s first newspaper.

MARK TWAIN (1835-1910) Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist. Author of numerous essays, short stories, and novels, including The Prince and the Pauper, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, hailed by Ernest Hemingway as “the Great American Novel.”