A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain Library) - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0520235762 ISBN 13: 9780520235762

Publisher: University of California Press, 2002

Synopsis

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.

About this title

From the Publisher:

10 1.5-hour cassettes

From the Inside Flap:

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.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Publication date: 2002
• ISBN 10: 0520235762
• ISBN 13: 9780520235762
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 2
• Number of pages: 496
• Editor: Stein Bernard L., Fischer Victor, Watson Richard A.
• Illustrator: Beard Daniel Carter