Mark Twain 
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.

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ILLUSTRATIONS

FOREWORD


A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT

    Preface

    A Word of Explanation

1. Camelot

2. King Arthur’s Court

3. Knights of the Table Round

4. Sir Dinadan the Humorist

5. An Inspiration

6. The Eclipse

7. Merlin’s Tower

8. The Boss

9. The Tournament

10. Beginnings of Civilization

11. The Yankee in Search of Adventures

12. Slow Torture

13. Freemen!

14. ‘Defend Thee, Lord!’

15. Sandy’s Tale

16. Morgan le Fay

17. A Royal Banquet

18. In the Queen’s Dungeons

19. Knight-Errantry as a Trade

20. The Ogre’s Castle

21. The Pilgrims

22. The Holy Fountain

23. Restoration of the Fountain

24. A Rival Magician

25. A Competitive Examination

26. The First Newspaper

27. The Yankee and the King Travel Incognito

28. Drilling the King

29. The Small-Pox Hut

30. The Tragedy of the Manor House

31. Marco

32. Dawley’s Humiliation

33. Sixth-Century Political Economy

34. The Yankee and the King Sold as Slaves

35. A Pitiful Incident

36. An Encounter in the Dark

37. An Awful Predicament

38. Sir Launcelot and Knights to the Rescue

39. The Yankee’s Fight with the Knights

40. Three Years Later

41. The Interdict

42. War!

43. The Battle of the Sand-Belt

44. A Postscript by Clarence


REFERENCES

EXPLANATORY NOTES

NOTE ON THE TEXT