A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court - Softcover

Twain, Mark

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0553211439 ISBN 13: 9780553211436

Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, 1983

Synopsis

When A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was published in 1889, Mark Twain was undergoing a series of personal and professional crises. Thus what began as a literary burlesque of British chivalry and culture grew into a disturbing satire of modern technology and social thought. The story of Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century American who is accidentally returned to sixth-century England, is a powerful analysis of such issues as monarchy versus democracy and free will versus determinism, but it is also one of Twain's finest comic novels, still fresh and funny after more than 100 years.

About this title

Review:

"Twain is the funniest literary American writer. . . . [I]t must have been a great pleasure to be him."
--George Saunders

About the Author:

Mark Twain, born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, led one of the most exciting and adventuresome of literary lives. Raised in the river town of Hannibal, Missouri, Twain had to leave school at age twelve to seek work. He was successfully a journeyman printer, a steamboat pilot, a halfhearted Confederate soldier (for a few weeks), and a prospector, miner, a reporter in the western territories. With the publication in 1865 of "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," Twain gained national attention as a frontier humorist, and with The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1855), he was acknowledged by the literary establishment as one of the greatest writers America would ever produce.

In 1880 Twain began promoting and financing heavily the ill-fated Paige typesetter, an invention designed to make the printing process fully automatic. This enterprise drained his energy and funds for almost fifteen years, until it drove him to the brink of bankruptcy. Ironically at the height of his naively optimistic involvement in his technological "wonder," he published his satirical A Connecticut Yankee in King's Arthur's Court (1889), as though the writer in him could see the dangers the investor in him was blind to.

Toward the end of his life, plagued by personal tragedy and financial failure, Mark Twain grew more and more pessimistic-an outlook not alleviated by his natural skepticism and sarcasm. Though his fame continued to widen. Twain spent his last years in gloom and exasperation, writing fables about "the damned human race."

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group
• Publication date: 1983
• ISBN 10: 0553211439
• ISBN 13: 9780553211436
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 336