In 1879, Colt Arms Factory superintendent Hank Morgan gets a crowbar to the head and wakes up in King Arthur's England of AD 528, replete with steel-plated knights, hefty horses, blushing ladies, vast castles, and a great oaken table the shape and size of a circus ring. Under this charming veneer roils a seething cesspit of slavery, superstition, criminal injustices legally wrought by Church as well as State, and hopeless despair.
Whatever is the epitome of Yankee practicality and American sensibilities to do? Why, civilize the barbarians, of course, and drag them kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century.
"If you only know the various comic-book and film adaptations of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, you're liable to imagine the book as a laugh riot, an exercise in anachronistic fun. Knights on bicycles! Knights in armor playing baseball! A newspaper named The Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano! In fact, Twain's 1889 novel is seldom what we'd call funny. Instead, it's more the literary equivalent of the Fourth of July-a farrago of politics, preaching, and fireworks." ~The Washington Post
Mark Twain began work on A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in 1879-the same year the Yankee Hank Morgan departed for his sojourn in sixth-century Britain. The first edition was published in 1889 and features more than 200 illustrations by the man who later would become founder of the Boy Scouts of America, Daniel Carter Beard. These illustrations are now in the public domain, and more than half have been incorporated into this edition, as well as its sequel written by Kim Iverson Headlee, King Arthur's Sister in Washington's Court, as an artistic homage to the classic edition of the first time travel story in all literature.
