A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

A Connecticut Yankee is Mark Twain’s most ambitious work, a tour de force with a science-fiction plot told in the racy slang of a Hartford workingman, sparkling with literary hijinks as well as social and political satire. Mark Twain characterized his novel as “one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race.” The Yankee, suddenly transported from his native nineteenth-century America to the sleepy sixth-century Britain of King Arthur and the Round Table, vows brashly to “boss the whole country inside of three weeks.” And so he does. Emerging as “The Boss,” he embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot—with unexpected results.

Daniel Carter Beard illustrated the first edition of Yankee in 1889, and Mark Twain praised his work as “better than the book—which is a good deal for me to say, I reckon.” This Mark Twain Library edition reprints the text based on the author’s manuscript, all 221 of Beard’s illustrations, and the notes from the California scholarly edition.