A Connecticut Yankee is Mark Twain’s most ambitious work, a tour de force with a science-fiction plot told in the racy slang of a Hartford workingman, sparkling with literary hijinks as well as social and political satire. Mark Twain characterized his novel as "one vast sardonic laugh at the trivialities, the servilities of our poor human race." The Yankee, suddenly transported from his native nineteenth-century America to the sleepy sixth-century Britain of King Arthur and the Round Table, vows brashly to "boss the whole country inside of three weeks." And so he does. Emerging as "The Boss," he embarks on an ambitious plan to modernize Camelot—with unexpected results.

"The Mark Twain Library is one of the glories of the University of California Press."—Los Angeles Times [Jonathan Kirsch, 11 September 1983]

"Handsome, readable and full of surprises . . . the American classics that come to us from the Mark Twain Library are simply superb."—Los Angeles Times [Jonathan Kirsch, 11 September 1983]

"The Mark Twain Project of the University of California Press is reuniting Samuel Clemens’s texts with the essential illustrations he commissioned for them, and the results are splendid: may the Twain never again be sundered!" Vanity Fair [Cathleen Medwick, vol. 46 (December 1983): 16]

"Each additional volume reaffirms our faith and celebration in this splendid series." Nineteenth-Century Fiction [vol. 39 (June 1984): 120-21]

"Any academic who assigns another text rather than one of the . . . volumes now available in the Mark Twain Library owes the profession an apology if it can be found." American Literature [vol. 56 (October 1984): 454] [the elided word is "five"—the review covered the five in print in Oct. 1984: 1. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; 2. No. 44, The Mysterious Stranger; 3. Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer, Detective; 4. The Prince and the Pauper; 5. A Connecticut Yankee.]

"One of the great scholarly enterprises of the century. . . . If you want to enjoy, and to understand fully, the genius of Mark Twain, the California editions are the only texts to have." London Telegraph [Michael Shelden]