A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

TWAIN, Mark. [Samuel L. Clemens].

Item Number: 128093

New York: Charles L. Webster, 1889.

First edition, mixed state of Twain’s tale of a 9th-century citizen of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself transported back in time to early medieval England. Octavo, original publisher’s decorated cloth with gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel, patterned endpapers, illustrated. Mixed state with the S-like ornament between the two word caption on page 59 but with broken type on page 72. In very good condition.

Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee after reading Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, exploring "a number of implicit parallels between Arthur's England and the American South: slavery; an agrarian economy which came into armed conflict with an industrial economy; a chivalric code which, Clemens said, was secondhand Walter Scott and kept the South mawkish, adolescent, verbose, and addicted to leatherheaded anachronisms like duels and tournaments. In both frameworks a civil war destroys the old order, and the Yankee has as acute a sense of loss as Mark Twain did" (Kaplan, 297).