A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus": First Edition of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

A Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens].

Item Number: 37051

New York: Charles L. Webster, 1889.

First edition, first printing 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 with both first edition, first printing issue points including the S-like ornament between the two word caption on page 59 and without broken type on page 72. In near fine 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).

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