TWAIN, Mark [Samuel L. Clemens].

A Yankee in King Arthur's Court.

New York: Charles L. Webster , 1889.

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Out of Stock Item Number: RRB-85622

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“You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus": First Edition of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court

First edition, early printing of a 9th-century citizen of Hartford, Connecticut who awakens to find himself transported back in time to early medieval England. Octavo, original green pictorial cloth, gilt titles and tooling to the spine and front panel with both first edition, without "S" ornament to p. 59. In near fine condition. Housed in a custom half morocco and chemise box.

Mark Twain wrote A Connecticut Yankee after reading Thomas Malory's Morte d'Arthur, exploring "a number of implicit parallels between Arthur's England and the American South: slavery; an agrarian economy which came into armed conflict with an industrial economy; a chivalric code which, Clemens said, was secondhand Walter Scott and kept the South mawkish, adolescent, verbose, and addicted to leatherheaded anachronisms like duels and tournaments. In both frameworks a civil war destroys the old order, and the Yankee has as acute a sense of loss as Mark Twain did" (Kaplan, 297).