A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain (1889)

I have spent the past couple of months immersed in the works of Mark Twain.  This is the first work of fiction that I have read--which is funny, because I did not think of Mark Twain as a memoir writer, but he wrote a fair amount about his personal life.

So this is a welcome breath of air.  Hank Morgan is an engineer from Connecticut who receives a blow to the head and wakes up in the time of King Arthur.  Imagine his surprise--in fact, it is his relative lack of surprise that is the hardest hurdle to get over.  Once you accept that he adjusts to his lot in life so quickly, the rest of it is a tongue in cheek satire of both the time he ends up in as well as the time he left.

Twain wrote this book at the beginning of the second Industrial Revolution, at the dawn of the era of electricity, steal, coal and gasoline.  The world was feeling very proud of it's accomplishments at that point in time, but workers were not well cared for in many instances.  The progress was made on the backs of others--so when Twain's Yankee notes that the nobles and clergy in the time of King Arthur are living off the labor of the peasants, he may have been commenting on more than the feudal system.  He does weave a lot of late nineteenth century technology into his characters ability to mesmerize the ancient crowds--they thought it was magic, when it was considered more or less common in the time he left.  He is a clever bloke, and the story has a lot of substance underneath it's more obvious fluff and satire.

Hank's travels with the King, both of them in disguise as common men, are a wonderful perspective on many things, and have a lot of applications to the world today.