A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

by Twain, Mark; Reiss, Edmund

• ISBN13: 9780451524751
• ISBN10: 0451524756
• Edition: Revised
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1963-04-01
• Publisher: Signet Classics

Summary

This novel tells the story of Hank Morgan, the quintessential self-reliant New Englander who brings to King Arthur' s Age of Chivalry the " great and beneficent" miracles of nineteenth-century engineering and American ingenuity. Through the collision of past and present, Twain exposes the insubstantiality of both utopias, destroying the myth of the romantic ideal as well as his own era' s faith in scientific and social progress. A central document in American intellectual history, "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur' s Court "is at once a hilarious comedy of anachronisms and incongruities, a romantic fantasy, a utopian vision, and a savage, anarchic social satire that only one of America' s greatest writers could pen.

Author Biography

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in Florida, Missouri, in 1835, and died at Redding, Connecticut in 1910. In his person and in his pursuits he was a man of extraordinary contrasts. Although he left school at twelve 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 but toward the end of his life he had to resort to lecture tours to pay his debts. He was hot-tempered, profane, and sentimental—and also pessimistic, cynical, and tortured by self-doubt. His nostalgia helped produce some of his best books. He lives in American letters as a great artist, the writer whom William Dean Howells called “the Lincoln of our literature.”

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chronology of Mark Twain'S Life and Work Historical Context of

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

Preface A Word of Explanation

The Tale of the Lost Land Camelot King Arthur's Court

Knights of the Table Round Sir Dinadan the Humorist An Inspiration

The Eclipse Merlin's Tower

The Boss The Tournament Beginnings of Civilization

The Yankee in Search of Adventures Slow Torture Freemen!

""Defend Thee, Lord!"" Sandy's Tale Morgan le Fay

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