A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens] [William Safire].

$1,500.00

Item Number: 128015

New York: Charles L. Webster and Company, 1889.

First edition, second state of Twain’s classic tale of a 9th-century citizen of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself transported back in time to early medieval England. Octavo, original green pictorial cloth, gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel, without “S” ornament to p. 59. and with broken type to p. 72. BAL 3429. From the library of William Safire with his bookplate to the pastedown. William Safire was an important American author, columnist, journalist, and presidential speechwriter. He joined Nixon’s campaign for the 1960 Presidential race, and supported him again in 1968. After Nixon’s 1968 victory, Safire served as a speechwriter for him and Spiro Agnew. He authored several political columns in addition to his weekly column “On Language” in The New York Times Magazine from 1979 until the month of his death and authored two books on grammar and linguistics: The New Language of Politics (1968) and what Zimmer called Safire’s “magnum opus,” Safire’s Political Dictionary. Safire later served as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board from 1995 to 2004 and in 2006 was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush. In very good condition with noted provenance.

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).