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Hank Morgan, a practical superintendent from a Hartford arms factory, is knocked out in a fight and wakes up in Camelot in the year 528. About to be burned…
Hank Morgan, a practical superintendent from a Hartford arms factory, is knocked out in a fight and wakes up in Camelot in the year 528. About to be burned at the stake, he remembers a solar eclipse and passes himself off as a magician. Soon he is building factories, newspapers and telephone lines, and duelling knights with a lasso, determined to drag the sixth century into the nineteenth.
Context and significance
Published in 1889, the book is part comic fantasy and part angry satire of chivalry, slavery and the power of an established church, and its ending turns surprisingly dark. It was also one of the first time-travel stories, appearing six years before The Time Machine.
About the author
Samuel Clemens (1835–1910) grew up in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the Mississippi, and worked as a printer's apprentice, a steamboat pilot, a silver prospector in Nevada and a newspaper reporter before he became Mark Twain. A comic story about a jumping frog made his name in 1865, and his lectures and travel books made him the most famous American writer of his time.