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. In his Introduction M. Thomas
Inge shows how A Connecticut Yankee develops from comedy to tragedy and
so into a novel that remains a major literary and cultural text for new
generations of readers. This edition reproduces a number of the original
drawings by Dan Beard, of whom Twain said 'he not only illustrates the
text but he illustrates my thoughts.'.