A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain, Fiction, Classics, Fantasy & Magic

Twain wrote the book as a burlesque of Romantic notions of chivalry after being inspired by a dream in which he was a knight himself and severely inconvenienced by the weight and cumbersome nature of his armor.

A Yankee engineer from Connecticut is accidentally transported back in time to the court of King Arthur, where he fools the inhabitants of that time into thinking he is a magician-and soon uses his knowledge of modern technology to become a "magician" in earnest, stunning the English of the Early Middle Ages with such feats as demolitions, fireworks and the shoring up of a holy well. Twain's fascination appears in his time traveler (from contemporary America, yet!), using his knowledge of science to introduce modern technology to Arthurian England. As with all works of a master like Twain, we highly recommend this novel -- but just between us, this book is a lot of fun, too. Go ahead, read it now.

About the Author
Twain, Mark: - "Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1835 - 1910), better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American writer, humorist, entrepreneur, publisher and lecturer. Among his novels are The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), the latter often called The Great American Novel. Though Twain earned a great deal of money from his writings and lectures, he invested in ventures that lost a great deal of money, notably the Paige Compositor, a mechanical typesetter, which failed because of its complexity and imprecision. In the wake of these financial setbacks, he filed for protection from his creditors via bankruptcy, and with the help of Henry Huttleston Rogers eventually overcame his financial troubles. Twain chose to pay all his pre-bankruptcy creditors in full, though he had no legal responsibility to do so."