A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by Mark Twain. It sends a practical, technological American of Twain's own century into the England of Arthurian romance, and its comedy comes from the collision between an engineer's habits of mind and a society organised around birth, religion and force.

Hank Morgan is about to be executed when he remembers an eclipse and claims the credit for it, which makes him a power at court. He spends the following years building schools and factories and introducing the printing press and the telephone, and Twain uses his progress as a running argument with the romance tradition he is borrowing: the knights are admirable and useless, and the church is the obstacle in the way.

The novel was published after Twain had worked for years on a burlesque of Arthurian stories, and it is darker than its opening suggests, ending in a battle fought with modern weapons against medieval opponents. His satire of borrowed chivalry and his doubts about progress are both on the surface of the book.