Hank Morgan, cracked on the head by a crowbar in nineteenth-century Connecticut, wakes to find himself in the England of King Arthur. The toughminded Yankee, an embodiment of scientific enlightenment, faces a world whose idyllic surface only masks the dark forces of fear, injustice, and ignorance. This is the springboard which launches one of literature’s most extraordinary excursions into fantasy. With the agility of Mark Twain’s unique virtuosity, this acrobatic tour de force moves from broad comedy to biting social satire, and from the pure joy of wild high jinks to deeply probing insights into the nature of man, whose capacity for progress is matched only by his capacity for destruction. The reader is shaken by laughter — and something more than laughter — as he falls uncar the book’s enchantment and finds that the grim truths of Mark Twain’s Camelot strike a resound¬ingly contemporary note. “This story is something other and greater than a funny book. It is a work written with a high purpose, to convey what se.rned to its author the most profound and elemental truths about human society.” — Stephen Leacock