A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court
Mark Twain moves from broad comedy to biting social satire in this literary classic.
Cracked on the head by a crowbar in nineteenth-century Connecticut, Hank Morgan wakes to find himself in King Arthur’s England. After using his knoweldge of an upcoming solar eclipse to escape a death sentence, Hank must then navigate his way through a medieval world whose idyllic surface masks fear, injustice, and ignorance.
Considered by H. L. Mencken to be “the most bitter critic of American platitude and delusion…that ever lived,” Twain enchants readers with a Camelot that strikes disturbingly contemporary notes in this acclaimed tour de force that encompasses both the pure joy of wild high jinks and deeply probing insights into the nature of man.
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MARK TWAIN, considered one of the greatest writers in American literature, was born Samuel Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died in Redding, Connecticut in 1910. As a young child, he moved with his family to Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi River, a setting that inspired his two best-known novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In his person and in his pursuits, he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at 12 when his father died, he was eventually awarded honorary degrees from Yale University, the University of Missouri, and Oxford University. His career encompassed such varied occupations as printer, Mississippi riverboat pilot, journalist, travel writer, and publisher. He made fortunes from his writing…