A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (Mark Twain Library)

"A Connecticut Yankee" is Mark Twain's most ambitious work, a tour de force with a science-fiction plot told in the racy slang of a Hartford workingman, sparkling with literary hijinks as well as social and political satire. Mark Twain characterized his novel as "one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race". The Yankee, suddenly transported from his native nineteenth-century America to the sleepy sixth-century Britain of King Arthur and the Round Table, vows brashly to "boss the whole country inside of three weeks". And so he does. Emerging as "The Boss", he embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot - with unexpected results.