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Mark Twain: Historical Romances

The Prince and the Pauper | A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court | Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc

Edited by Susan Harris

“Taken together, these three stories (particularly A Connecticut Yankee) provide a classic modern view of premodern society: its revulsion with medieval superstition and backwardness and, at the same time, a nostalgia for medieval grandeur coupled with doubts about modern ‘progress.’ And then there’s just the sheer fun of reading Mark Twain.” — First Things

Overview

Overview

Interviews Susan K. Harris: The round-the-world trip that made Mark Twain an anti-imperialist
March 31, 2020

Save $125 when you buy all eight volumes of the Complete Mark Twain Library.

In the three novels collected in this Library of America volume, Mark Twain turned his comic genius to a period that fascinated and repelled him in equal measure: medieval and Renaissance Europe. This lost world of stately pomp and unspeakable cruelty, artistic splendor and abysmal ignorance—the seeming opposite of brashly optimistic, commercial, democratic nineteenth-century America—engaged Twain’s imagination, inspiring a children’s classic, an astonishing fantasy of comedy and violence, and an unusual fictional biography.

Twain drew on his fascination with impersonation and the theme of the double in The Prince and the Pauper (1882), which brilliantly uses the device of identical boys from opposite ends of the social hierarchy to evoke the tumultuous contrasts of Henry VIII’s England. As the pauper Tom Canty is raised to the throne, while the rightful heir is cast out among thieves and beggars, Twain sustains one of his most compelling narratives. A perennial children’s favorite, the novel brings an impassioned American point of view to the injustices of traditional European society.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889) finds Twain in high satiric form. When hard-headed Yankee mechanic Hank Morgan is knocked out in a fight, he wakes up in Camelot in A.D. 528—and finds himself pitted against the medieval rituals and superstitions of King Arthur and his knights. In a hilarious burlesque of the age of chivalry and of its cult in the 19th-century American South, Twain demolishes knighthood’s romantic aura to reveal a brutish, violent society beset by ignorance. But the comic mood gives way to a darker questioning of both ancient and modern society, culminating in an astonishing apocalyptic conclusion that questions both American progress and Yankee “ingenuity” as Camelot is undone by the introduction of advanced technology.

“Taking into account . . . her origin, youth, sex, illiteracy, early environment, and the obstructing conditions under which she exploited her high gifts and made her conquest in the field and before the courts that tried her for her life—she is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever known.” So Twain wrote of the heroine of Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc (1896), his most elaborate work of historical reconstruction. A respectful and richly detailed chronicle, by turns admiring and indignant, Joan of Arc opens a fascinating window onto the moral imagination of America’s greatest comic writer.

Susan K. Harris, volume editor, is Hall Distinguished Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Kansas and the author of Mark Twain’s Escape from Time.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Mark Twain: Historical Romances is kept in print by a gift from James C. & Melissa A. March to the Guardians of American Letters Fund.

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ISBN: 978-0-94045082-0 1031 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 71 Library of America Series

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