A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's
Court
Published in 1889, Connecticut Yankee is
one of the world's first stories about time travel. The
seed for this novel was probably planted during MT's
1884-1885 reading tour for Huck Finn, when George
Washington Cable bought him a copy of Malory's Morte
D'Arthur in an upstate New York bookstore. But MT's
interest in travel to "old worlds" was a longstanding one,
as his first book shows. And his interest in the British
past was also a lifelong preoccupation, as can be seen in
texts like The Prince and the Pauper, or even
the Memory-Builder game
he invented and patented to help American children
learn the dates of England's various monarchies. As MT's
fantastic attempt to locate his time and place in terms of
its imagined pasts and its possible futures, Connecticut
Yankee is perhaps his most complex book.
|
