A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court
A practical Connecticut engineer is knocked out and wakes up in sixth-century England, where he uses his modern know-how to astonish King Arthur’s court and set about ‘improving’ the Middle Ages. What begins as broad comedy—gunpowder, bicycles, and advertising among knights—darkens into a sharp satire of superstition, tyranny, and the costs of progress. Twain skewers both romantic nostalgia for chivalry and the brutalities of his own industrial age. Inventive, funny, and finally unsettling, it is one of the earliest time-travel novels and among Twain’s boldest and most provocative works.
About the Author
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, was born in 1835 in Florida, Missouri, and grew up in Hannibal on the banks of the Mississippi. Most of his fiction would later draw on that childhood, sometimes directly. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, then…
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