A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain Library Book 4)

__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. CONTENTS ILLUSTRATIONS FOREWORD Preface A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR'S COURT A WORD OF EXPLANAION CHAPTER 1. Camelot CHAPTER 2. King Arthur's Court CHAPTER 3. Knights of the Table Round CHAPTER 4. Sir Dinadan the Humorist CHAPTER 5. An Jnspiration CHAPTER 6. The Eclipse CHAPTER 7. Merlin's Tower CHAPTER 8. The Boss CHAPTER 9. The Journament CHAPTER 10. Beginnings of Civilization CHAPTER 11. The Yankee in Search of Adventures CHAPTER 12. Slow Torture CHAPTER 13. Freemen! CHAPTER 14. "Defend 'Thee, Lord!" CHAPTER 15. Sandy's Tale CHAPTER 16. Morgan le Fay CHAPTER 17. A Royal Banquet CHAPTER 18. In the Queen's Dungeons CHAPTER 19. Knight -Errantry as a Trade CHAPTER 20. The Ogre's Castle CHAPTER 21. The Pilgrims CHAPTER 22. The Holy Fountain CHAPTER 23. Restoration of the Fountain CHAPTER 24. A Rival Magician CHAPTER 25. A Competitive Examination CHAPTER 26. The First Newspaper CHAPTER 27. The Yankee and the King Travel Jncognito CHAPTER 28. Drilling the King CHAPTER 29. The Small-Pox Hut CHAPTER 30. The Tragedy of the Manor House CHAPTER 31. Marco CHAPTER 32. Dowley's Humiliation CHAPTER 33. Sixth-Century Political Economy CHAPTER 34. The Yankee and the King Sold as Slaves CHAPTER 35. A Pitiful Incident CHAPTER 36. An Encounter in the Dark CHAPTER 37. An Awful Predicament CHAPTER 38. Sir Launcelot and Xnights to the Rescue CHAPTER 39. The Yankee's Fight with the Knights CHAPTER 40. Three years Later CHAPTER 41. The Interdict CHAPTER 42. War! CHAPTER 43. The Battle of the Sand-Belt CHAPTER 44. A Postscript by Clarence REFERENCES EXPLANATORY NOTES NOTE ON THE TEXT 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. This book is designed primarily to alleviate the agony that language learning in its early stages entails, when the foreign words in the sentence simply will not combine to make sense. Legions of beginners give up when they could have made it with the aid of a book like this. But for centuries schoolmasters have frowned on this device, calling it dirty names like crib, crutch, pony. But the truth is that highly educated and motivated people have learned to read a foreign language this way. The great German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who knew many ancient and modern languages, acquire A blow on the head transports a Yankee to 528 A.D. where he proceeds to modernize King Arthur's kingdom by organizing a school system, constructing telephone lines, and inventing the printing press.