A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

About this edition

A Nineteenth Century Engineer Wakes Up in Camelot. What Happens Next Is Not a Fairy Tale.

Hank Morgan is a Hartford arms factory foreman with a talent for machinery and no patience for nonsense. A blow to the head sends him thirteen centuries into the past, and he opens his eyes in the England of 528 AD, surrounded by knights, wizards, and a court that treats his boots as sorcery.

Condemned to burn, Hank saves himself with the one thing no one at the Round Table possesses: a printed almanac and the date of a solar eclipse. Within days he is The Boss, second only to King Arthur himself. Within a few years he has laid telephone lines through the forests, opened schools in secret, put newspapers in the hands of peasants, and begun quietly dismantling a thousand years of superstition.

Then the old world pushes back.

Published in 1889, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is one of the earliest time travel novels ever written, and it remains one of the strangest. Mark Twain begins in comedy, with a wisecracking Yankee running rings around Merlin, and ends somewhere far darker: a meditation on progress, power, and what happens when a man convinced of his own enlightenment is handed the tools to remake a civilization. It is a satire of romantic chivalry, a broadside against inherited privilege and institutional cruelty, and a warning about technology that arrived decades ahead of its time.

Funny, furious, and unsettling by turns, it is Twain at his most ambitious.

About This Collector's Edition

This edition has been designed and typeset for readers who want a classic worth keeping on the shelf, not a disposable reprint.

• The complete, unabridged novel, all forty four chapters, presented with Twain's original framing preface and closing note
• Original illustrations created for this edition, placed throughout the book at key moments in Hank Morgan's journey
• An original biography of Mark Twain, tracing the path from Samuel Clemens the Mississippi pilot to the most recognized author in America, and the losses and convictions that shaped this particular book
• Premium interior design with a classic serif text face, generous margins, and clean chapter openings for comfortable long form reading
• Durable, giftable presentation suited to collectors, students, and anyone building a library of the classics

Whether you are returning to Twain after years away or meeting Hank Morgan for the first time, this is an edition made to be read closely and kept.