Overview

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. Daniel Carter Beard illustrated the first edition of Yankee in 1889, and Mark Twain praised his work as better than the book - which is a good deal for me to say, I reckon. This Mark Twain Library edition reprints the text based on the author's manuscript, all 221 of Beard's illustrations, and the notes from the California scholarly edition.

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9780520235762

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Reviews

The Yankee is a jewel. Nobody will ever be able to read, much less teach, it without this book. - American Literature Each additional volume reaffirms our faith and celebration in this splendid series. Nineteenth-Century Fiction Any academic who assigns another text rather than one of the... volumes now available in the Mark Twain Library owes the profession an apology if it can be found. American Literature Handsome, readable and full of surprises...the American classics that come to us from the Mark Twain Library are simply superb. - Jonathan Kirsch, Los Angeles Times The Mark Twain Project of the University of California Press is reuniting Samuel Clemens's texts with the essential illustrations he commissioned for them, and the results are splendid: may the Twain never again be sundered! - Cathleen Medwick, Vanity Fair If you want to enjoy, and to understand fully, the genius of Mark Twain, the California editions are the only texts to have. - Michael Shelden, London Telegraph

Author Information

The Mark Twain Project is a major editorial and publishing program of The Bancroft Library. Its six resident editors are at work on a comprehensive scholarly edition of all of Mark Twain's private papers and published works. Twenty-three of an estimated seventy volumes in The Works and Papers of Mark Twain are currently available.

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