A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

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.

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.

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.

He drew on his boyhood for The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and on his piloting years for Life on the Mississippi. Late in life he lost his fortune in bad investments and paid his debts with a lecture tour around the world. He was born in a year of Halley's Comet and died when it returned.