In 1879, Colt Arms Factory superintendent Hank Morgan gets a crowbar to the head and wakes up in King Arthur’s England of AD 528, replete with steel-plated knights, hefty horses, blushing ladies, vast castles, and a great oaken table the shape and size of a circus ring. Under this charming veneer roils a cesspit of slavery, superstition, criminal injustices legally wrought by Church as well as State, and hopeless despair.

Whatever is an epitome of Yankee practicality and American sensibilities to do? Why, conquer the kingdom, of course, and drag it kicking and screaming into the nineteenth century.

If you only know the various comic-book and film adaptations of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, you’re liable to imagine the book as a laugh riot, an exercise in anachronistic fun. Knights on bicycles! Knights in armor playing baseball! A newspaper named The Camelot Weekly Hosannah and Literary Volcano! In fact, Twain’s 1889 novel is seldom what we’d call funny. Instead, it’s more the literary equivalent of the Fourth of July–a farrago of politics, preaching and fireworks. The Washington Post

Includes illustrations by Daniel Carter Beard created for the original 1889 edition.