A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

A nineteenth-century Yankee engineer is knocked out and wakes in sixth-century Camelot, where he uses modern know-how to pass as a magician and modernize the kingdom. Twain uses the time-travel conceit to satirize both feudal superstition and his own era’s faith in progress, as the Yankee’s industrial improvements spiral toward catastrophe. Funnier and angrier than it first appears, the novel darkens into a critique of power, technology, and human cruelty that unsettles its comic premise.