When A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of modern technology and social thought. The story of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American who is accidentally returned to sixth-century England, is a powerful analysis of such issues as monarchy versus democracy and free will versus determinism, but it is also one of Twain's finest comic novels, still fresh and funny after more than 100 years. In his Introduction M. Thomas Inge shows how A Connecticut Yankee develops from comedy to tragedy and so into a novel that remains a major literary and cultural text for new generations of readers. This edition reproduces a number of the original drawings by Dan Beard, of whom Twain said 'he not only illustrates the text but he illustrates my thoughts.'.
"Twain is the funniest literary American writer. . . . [I]t must have been a great pleasure to be him."
--George Saunders
Mark Twain is the pseudonym of Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910). Mark Twain was always nostalgic about his childhood and in 1876 The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was published, based on his own experiences. The book was soon recognised as a work of genius and eight years later the sequel, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, was published.
Target Age: 18+
Penguin Classics
Pub date: February 28, 1972
0.72" H x 7.92" L x 5.06" W
416 pages
paperback