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



## Drew (Jun 7, 2007)

Anyone else read this? 

Personally, I think it's Twain's greatest work, and is criminally underrated. I read the (excellent, if structurally flawed - Hemingway's comment that "American literature starts here, provided you ignore everything after the riverboat, which is just cheating" is spot on) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn something like three times in college, yet was never once assigned this work. The irony is, the racial issues we were discussing in Huck Finn are if anything MORE notworthy in "A Connecticut Yankee" - it's an absolutely stinging indictment of the slavery system, told as an allegory about serfs and nobles, and modern enlightenment. 

Pick it up if you dig Twain, or would if the man wasn't always writing about little boys on rafts.


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## eaeolian (Jun 7, 2007)

Brilliant work. Mr. Clemens is one of my favorite writers, and this is definitely his crowning achievement. I think it gets overlooked because most kids miss the allegory...


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## noodles (Jun 7, 2007)

I still think Mark Twain is the greatest American author to have ever lived. His ability to mix wit and sarcasm together with a extremely well thought out socio-political argument is absolutely unparalleled.

Huck Finn was disallowed reading when I was in high school, due to it's "blatant racism". It was a moment of great disgust for me to realize that the people who were assembling the curriculum meant to teach me were so ignorant as to mistake a such a strong (and unpopular) stance against racism, as racism.


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## eaeolian (Jun 7, 2007)

noodles said:


> I still think Mark Twain is the greatest American author to have ever lived. His ability to mix wit and sarcasm together with a extremely well thought out socio-political argument is absolutely unparalleled.



I can't pick one out of him, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, or Ellison as the best, but that's damn good company, regardless.



noodles said:


> Huck Finn was disallowed reading when I was in high school, due to it's "blatant racism". It was a moment of great disgust for me to realize that the people who were assembling the curriculum meant to teach me were so ignorant as to mistake a such a strong (and unpopular) stance against racism, as racism.



Welcome to Virginia.


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## noodles (Jun 7, 2007)

eaeolian said:


> Welcome to Virginia.



I found it pretty surprising, since I just assumed the VA Board of Education would be all about encouraging racism.


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## ohio_eric (Jun 7, 2007)

eaeolian said:


> I can't pick one out of him, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, or Ellison as the best, but that's damn good company, regardless.



 


That is indeed damn fine company. Ellison doesn't get mentioned enough as a truly great writer.


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## eaeolian (Jun 7, 2007)

ohio_eric said:


> That is indeed damn fine company. Ellison doesn't get mentioned enough as a truly great writer.



Not to jack Drew's thread, but it's nice to see someone say that. I think working mostly in short stories gets him less recognition, sadly.


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## Drew (Jun 7, 2007)

My advisor, one day in class while discussing Richard Wright's "Black Boy," commented about the violence, "...and I'm sorry if I'm being a little flippant about some of this, but it's not like we're discussing the greatest work of literature ever written, exactly. That's next week." He was referring to Invisible Man. 

I did my term paper for my senior seminar on the relationship between the concept of invisibility as presented in that book and the structural aspects of the narrative voice in that book. Not only does it hold up as a novel on it's own right, but pay attention to the way the narrator describes himself in the opening of that book - not only is the narrative voice first person singular, but he's also very careful to only describe his physical description through the eyes of others - "some would say I'm a..." "I've been called..." etc. It's actually notable in the few places he does provide physical details how awkward his phrasing is as he makes sure that the narrator never actually says anything about how he sees himself, but only how others see him. It's fascinating. 

Anyway, I agree, Ellison should be read a lot more than he is.  

Ironically, there's a connection here between Ellison and another issue that I'm surprised the VA board of Education didn't try to supress Huck Finn on - while it's since become a little more accepted as at least a possibility, there's a scene in which the narrator is offered a butler sort of job by the son of a person he's trying to get a job from, and it's implied (both by the nature of this guy and the fact some of the clubs he mentioned were known for this in the day) that he's a homosexual. In one line, he says, "We'll be like Huck and Jim," referring to open companionship between a black and white man free from racial tensions, but there's been increasing speculation over the years since publication that Ellison was one of the first to pick up on alledged homosexual tension between Huck and Jim on the raft - there's a famous essay called something like, "Come back to the raft, sweetie" or something, an actual line of Jim's from the novel, that builds this argument. 

On one hand, it's wild conjecture, but on the other the argument that on some level Twain may have consciously or subconsciously implied that Jim was pimping himself to Huck in return for assistance in getting his freedom is certainly an interesting one.


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## scott from _actual time_ (Jun 7, 2007)

eaeolian said:


> I can't pick one out of him, Vonnegut, Fitzgerald, or Ellison as the best....


i'd have to go with Faulkner, who criticised the racism from inside the same society that promolgated it.

but great thread regardless.


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## ohio_eric (Jun 7, 2007)

OK so I go to my local library to grab myself a copy of this book. I like Twain and I have never read it so I figure let's go for it. 

So I get to my library, which for such a small town is pretty well stocked, and I look up the book on their online catalog. Get this, they keep it in the Children's section.  Of course once I got up there and saw they had Huck Finn and such as well I wans't so shocked. It's always nice to see the kids offered good stuff to read. Another big plus was the librarian's in the kid's section were pretty damn cute. You just can't beat a cute well-read girl.


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## Naren (Jun 7, 2007)

Very good book. "A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court" is just dang entertaining.

As for Huck Finn... I've read it 3 times now. Once by myself, once for a high school class, and once for a college class (where we analyzed the shit out of that book. I wrote a pretty awesome essay on it, taking a very unconventional approach to my viewing of the novel). One of the quotes that sticks out in my memory is: "Was anyone hurt?" "No ma'm. Killed a nigger." I think that helped sum up the racist thoughts of the characters in the novel. It really emphasized on how people believed that a slave was their property and that the worst thing you could do to anyone was steal their slave. Several times, they mention that you would go to hell for helping a slave escape. What I thought was interesting was how Huck believed that what he was doing was wrong, but he was willing to go to hell for it anyway. Normally you'd think that everyone else is wrong and you're right. But he believed that everyone else was right and he was wrong, but he would be wrong anyway.

Mark Twain had some of the best quotes. "It's not hard to quit smoking. I've done it hundreds of times" and other great stuff like that.


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## Drew (Jun 8, 2007)

ohio_eric said:


> OK so I go to my local library to grab myself a copy of this book. I like Twain and I have never read it so I figure let's go for it.
> 
> So I get to my library, which for such a small town is pretty well stocked, and I look up the book on their online catalog. Get this, they keep it in the Children's section.  Of course once I got up there and saw they had Huck Finn and such as well I wans't so shocked. It's always nice to see the kids offered good stuff to read. Another big plus was the librarian's in the kid's section were pretty damn cute. You just can't beat a cute well-read girl.



This was actually one of the major hurdles in the early days of American literature - we had all these great classic works by Twain and Hawthorne and Melville, but the conception abroard was that American authors were just writing "children's stories" not fit for serious literary analysis, largely because American authors were experimenting a bit more with form, and were more willing to embrace local dialect. It wasn't until the 1920's that American works began to get critical attention, and this perception began to change. 

Frankly, I'm still a little surprised Twain is in the children's section - sure, it's a story a child can enjoy, but it's not one where I think a child could necessarily understand the full nuances of the book - the bitter sarcasm that Twain approaches racial issues in his writing is lost on someone who doesn't know not to take it literallly.


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