Mark Twain

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, the sixth of seven children of Jane (née Lampton; 1803-1890), a native of Kentucky, and John Marshall Clemens (1798-1847), a native of Virginia. His parents met when his father moved to Missouri. They were married in 1823. Twain was of Cornish, English, and Scots-Irish descent. Only three of his siblings survived childhood: Orion (1825-1897), Henry (1838-1858), and Pamela (1827-1904). His brother Pleasant Hannibal (1828) died at three weeks of age, his sister Margaret (1830-1839) when Twain was three, and his brother Benjamin (1832-1842) three years later. A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is an 1889 novel by American humorist and writer Mark Twain. The book was originally titled A Yankee in King Arthur's Court. Some early editions are titled A Yankee at the Court of King Arthur. In the book, a Yankee engineer from Connecticut named Hank Morgan receives a severe blow to the head and is somehow transported in time and space to England during the reign of King Arthur. After some initial confusion and his capture by one of Arthur's knights, Hank realizes that he is actually in the past, and he uses his knowledge to make people believe that he is a powerful magician. He attempts to modernize the past in order to make people's lives better, but in the end he is unable to prevent the death of Arthur and an interdict against him by the Catholic Church of the time, which grows fearful of his power.