Released in 1889 by Charles L. Webster & Co.			First edition had 575 pages, and about 220 illustrations.
Inspired by Mallory's Le Morte d'Arthur, given to Clemens by G.W. Cable in 1884.				Written intermitantly over a four-year period, from 1886 to 1889.
Humorous journalist Charles Clark accused Twain of plagarizing his story The Fortunate Island, in which a professor comes upon an island housing a sixth-century civilization, and attempts to bring them into modern times; Twain deined the charges in an 1890 interview to the New York World.

I had started a teacher-factory and a lot of Sunday-schools the first thing; as a result, I now had an admirable system of graded schools in full blast in those places, and also a complete variety of Protestant congregations all in a prosperous and growing condition. Everybody could be any kind of a Christian he wanted to; there was perfect freedom in that matter. But I confined public religious teaching to the churches and the Sunday-schools, permitting nothing of it in my other educational buildings. I could have given my own sect the preference and made everybody a Presbyterian without any trouble, but that would have been to affront a law of human nature: spiritual wants and instincts are as various in the human family as are physical appetites, complexions, and features, and a man is only at his best, morally, when he is equipped with the religious garment whose color and shape and size most nicely accommodate themselves to the spiritual complexion, angularities, and stature of the individual who wears it; and besides I was afraid of a united Church; it makes a mighty power, the mightiest conceivable, and then when it by and by gets into selfish hands, as it is always bound to do, it means death to human liberty, and paralysis to human thought.

Illustrated by Dan Beard, who used the faces of real life celebrities for his drawings; these included Tennyson, Sarah Bernhardt, Jay Gould, Queen Victoria, the Prince of Wales, and Kaiser Wilhelm; he used his own face for the drawing of a drunk.
Considered a pioneering science fiction novel, primarily for the exploration of how 19th-century technology would have affected King Arthur's England.				The first filmed version of the story was in 1921; there have been many filmed and staged adaptations since then.
At the time of its publication, Twain erroneously considered the book "my swan-song, my retirement from literature, permanently"; while hardly Twain's final book, it was the last book of his peak creative output, which began with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876.

A Connecticut Yankee is a fantasy about how Hank Morgan is knocked unconscious in 19th-century Connecticut and awakens in King Arthur's England in 538. Over a span of 10 years, Morgan introduces profound changes into this society.

The story is unfolded in a frame format. In Warwick Castle, England, the narrator meets Hank Morgan, who proceeds to tell how he was knocked on the head with a crowbar during a fight in Hartford. He awakens under a tree with a horseman staring at him, and is taken by this man to Camelot. Hank finishes up his story and retires to sleep; first, however, he gives the narrator a manuscript in which his entire history in Camelot is unfolded.

The narrator begins reading the manuscript. In Camelot, Hank is sentenced to be burned at the stake, but is released when he fools King Arthur into thinking that he is responsible for darkening the sun, the result of an eclipse. He is named perpetual minister and executive to the king.

Now a distinguished personage in the court, Hank goes about inventing little items to make his life more comfortable, such as soap, matches, books, pens, and ink. Hank is considered a one of the greatest men in England; even more important than his rival Merlin.

Several years pass, and Hank has made profound changes in the English society. He has founded new industries, set up schools and trained teachers, and supported religious tolerance.

One day, a woman named Sandy appears in court and tells of three ogres who have held her mistress and 44 beautiful girls captive for 26 years. Hank is given the commission to rescue these damsels in distress. Upon their journey, Hank and Sandy come upon the castle of Arthur's sister, Morgan le Fay, and go in to visit her. Morgan lives up to her reputation as a cruel woman. She even stabs a page when he accidentally touches her.

The two travellers soon reach their destination, and Hank is surprised to learn that the captives' castle is really a pigsty, and that the beautiful girls are just pigs. Hank buys the pigs from the swineherds, who were Sandy's so-called ogres.

Hank is informed of a holy fountain that has stopped running, and of how Merlin is trying to fix it. Hank goes to investigate, and finds out that it is an ordinary well with a leak. After fixing the leak, he makes a great show of breaking the spell over the fountain, and soon the fountain is working again.

King Arthur appears in the countryside where Hank is staying. The two decide to tour the country in disguise, and soon set upon their way. After several adventures, Hank and the king are captured by slave traders, and are sold into bondage. Over a month later, their slave caravan enters London, where Hank unlocks his own chains but is unable to rescue the king. Hank is afterwards put in jail for fighting with whom he thought was the slave master, but turns out to be a stranger.

After getting out of jail, Hank discovers that the slaves killed their master, and were sentenced to hanging the next day. Hank is captured, and the moment for the hanging arrives. As the king is being blindfolded, a contingent of 500 knights on bicycles ride in and save the day.

Back at Camelot, Hank is preparing for his upcoming joust with Sagramour le Desirous, who thinks that Hank insulted him years previous. During the joust, Hank pulls out a revolver and kills Sagramour. Five hundred knights charge toward Hank, and he uses two revolvers on them, until they disperse in terror.

Over the next few years, Hank continues making huge advances in the society. He invents the telegraph, telephone, steamships, and railways. Hanks marries Sandy, and has a baby with her. The family travels to France for the baby's health. While there, major events shake up Arthur's kingdom. A civil war erupts when Arthur learns of Launcelot's affair with Guenever. Arthur is killed in a battle with Mordred, his nephew. The Church grabs control of the country, and Hank proclaims that he is ruler until a new government is set up.

The church masses a huge army against Hank's heavily guarded fortress, but are thoroughly destroyed in space of minutes when coming upon Hank's modern instruments of warfare. Hank and his 53 assistants are rulers of the land.

Hank's experiences in the sixth century end when he is poisoned by a disguised Merlin in his fortress, and is condemned to sleep for 13 centuries. Merlin is soon after killed when bumping into an electric fence outside the fortress. The narrator then finishes up the manuscript, goes in to look at a sleeping Hank, and hears him mumbling and crying out about the main characters of the story.