Over the past few days I’ve read Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. Now, I’ve picked up* A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court*. I don’t find this book nearly as great as the other works I’ve read. Am I missing something or is this considered a lesser novel?
How about* The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson*? Should I also include it in my reading of Twain?
Maybe you should try his short stories. I particularly liked The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.
I loved Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn when I was younger, recently I tried to read Letters from Earth and A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, I’ve found them to be long winded, very dated books that did not stand the test of time. His short stories are a riot though
Boy, I dunno. I really enjoyed it. It is been a looooonnnnng time since I read and I was very young. Maybe it is more fun as a youth. OTOH, I seem to remember that it was slow to start. How well do you know the Arthurian legends? That helps.
I really only know the three works that you mentioned, so I can’t help in recommending something else.
Puddn’head Wilson is a fun little book. I really liked Roughing It.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is one of my favorite books.
A lot of what Twain was trying to do in that book was redo what Don Quixote did: de-romanticize the days of knights-errant. By Twain’s time, the Middle Ages had come to be seen in that romantic light again. Twain showed the knights to be fools; the rulers (save Arthur) to be cruel despots; the vast majority of people to be ignorant, oppressed, and poorly fed; and the Church to be an overriding force for ignorance and superstition. The Church, in fact, is what ultimately destroys what the clever Yankee manages to build in England. The Yankee was shown to be a bringer of light to the middle ages, giving to the people things like electric lights, the printing press, telphones, a modern economy, formal education, and the concept of democracy. He dismantles superstitions by showing wizards like Merlin to be charlatans. He attempts to bring down the power of the Church and proclaim a republic, because he knows that benevolent kings like Arthur are few and far between, and even Arthur is only a good ruler for his time.
Basically, A Connecticut Yankee was a satire in the style of Don Quixote, and in that sense isn’t much like the more-or-less pure adventure novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn.
I second this suggestion. Some of Mark Twain’s short stories are wonderful reading. My fave: The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.
I like A Tramp Abroad and Following The Equator.
Any of Twain’s travel stuff. Life On The Mississippi is great, too.
I also have a collection of Twain’s news articles when he lived in Nevada.
I heartily second “Life on the Mississippi.” It’s available online with the original illos!
Innocents Abroad is one of my all time favorite books. Twain’s other travel books are also great.
Regarding Connecticut Yankee: Twain spent some time in Hawaii, and wanted to write a novel about his interpreter. (I forget his name, call him X.) X was a collateral Hawaiian noble, fluent in English, funny, sharp and a convert to Christianity. He contracted leprosy shortly before he was supposed to be married, and instead of hiding it for several years, admitted it, was shipped off to Father Damien’s leper colony, and died there.
We have a lot of letters Twain wrote talking about his “Hawaiian novel,” and we know that his protagonist rejected his conversion to Christianity and died a pagan, and that a lot of the novel was about the clash of modernity and primitives, and not just on the material level. Not one page of this novel survives. Connecticut Yankee was written the year after Twain stopped talking about his Hawaiian novel, and was finished very quickly. Best theory is that Twain took these themes and moved them to Arthurian England.
I found that rereading the book with this in mind made it more interesting, YMMV.
Puddinhead Wilson is OK. I have a two volume set of the collected Mark Twain, and browsing through it is a testament to the amount of writing, and the number of original ideas that he had.
Other than Huckleberry Finn, I prefer his shorter works (I don’t really care for Connecticut Yankee.
My absolute favorite from him was Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses, one of the best-written bits of criticism I’ve read. A great hatchet job and, incidentally, a great guide to writing fiction.
There’s also his hilarious “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism”. Read it and never think of him the same way again.
Other greats of his include, The Mysterious Stranger, **An Extract from Captain Stormfield’s Visit to Heaven,**and The McWilliamses and the Burglar alarm.
Twain got very acidic over time, and I think one of his few weaknesses as a writer is that he ultimately comes across as hating almost everybody. Nothing was ever good enough for Twain. Even the best of his contemporary world was only good in comparison to what had come before, which was a total wash. As such, he tend to have very, very few sympathetic characters, and these are almost always those with absolutely no visdion of the world beyond their doorstep. This tendency certainly shows up more in his later books, and the best ones have less of it.
For all that, I like Twain. He’s clearly one of the best writerws in history, and managed to take what might have been a purely regional literary work and make it a globally-loved text.
Of course, he also introduces modern warfare, which undoes everything in the end. So I don’t see this as the paean to modern life you make it out to be.
Also, IIRC, although Arthur was a nice fellow, he was also something of a dolt.
I’m not trying to dismantle what you said, I just think there’s more to it.
A Connecticut Yankee is, perversely, my favorite Twain. I’ve re-read it more often than any other book by him. I find Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, by contrast, pretty hard going.
Skewering the romantic ideals of knights in armor probably appealed to more than Twain’s sense of the ridiculous. IIRC, he thought that exagerrated Southern feelings of chivalry engendered by Sir Walter Scott’s “Ivanhoe” and other such stories paved the way for the South’s attitude toward the Civil War. (apparently he thought that had they had a more realistic approach to politics and war they wouldn’t have rushed into war). So he took delight in trashing the system and showing it inferior to a modern world. You have to note that he pokes as much fun at his Yankee, Hanmk Morgan, as he does at the Round Table. Twain was a Southern boy living in Hartford when he wrote it (He actually wrote it at Elmira, N.Y., I believe. But his house was in Hartford), and it must have sttruck him as ironic to be writing as a “Yankee”.
A hearty thirding for Life on the Mississippi, which I suspect is really the book closest to Twain;s heart. I love all his travelogues, too – Roughing It, An Innocent Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator.
My ultimate Mark Twain recommendation is Mark Twain A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Writings (which is usually available on half.com for a fraction of its cost elsewhere). It’s an incredible encyclopedia that includes:
*chapter by chapter synopses of all of his novels
*detailed synopses of his short stories
*biographies of everybody of significance in his life and work
*fantastic insights into his times
I agree that as much as you would love to love Huckleberry Finn, and as great as the story is, the difference in writing styles of the last 120 years can bog it down a bit. This helps tremendously.
My favorite book by Twain is his Autobiography, published posthumously. There are several different editions and they vary WIDELY, but the best that I’ve read is the Neider version. Twain knew that this would not be published until he and his daughters were dead, so he was very frank in his opinions on religion, money, race (it’s ironic that a man so often banned from schools due to racism was one of the most progressive thinkers of his day on the subject), sex, etc… It’s not exactly the equivalent of a 21st century tell-all, but it’s head/shoulders above Henry Adams and Ben Franklin in terms of frankness and real life lessons.
Also, the DVD of Mark Twain Tonight is available through Netflix and well worth a watch. Holbrook didn’t just put on a white wig and start acting: he studied Twain for many years, he met with Twain’s surviving secretaries, servants, friends and even essentially lived with Twain’s daughter (an old woman when Holbrook was a young man) for a while to learn Twain’s mannerisms, speech, etc., all of whom said that he was the reincarnation of Twain when he took the stage (except for the white suit- Twain actually never wore a white suit when giving a performance, only on his “off time”, but Holbrook liked the look). Since Twain was a bigger stage star for his one-man-shows as for his writings, this helps get a greater perspective of the man and the writer.
I have heard A Conneticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court described as allegory of colonialism. We go in to a place that is less developed and try to get them to do things our way, and it leads to disaster. The irony in this reading, that it’s Hank’s culture’s own past that is being colonized, is hillarious.