Twain is considered to be one of the most significant novelists in American history, but A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is generally thought of as an unstable effort. In his lifetime, Twain was greatly admired and immensely popular as a humorist, and he was widely read in newspapers. This popularity dwindled in his later years, from about the turn of the century until his death in 1910, when his writing became increasingly dark and his vision of humanity bleak. After his death, Twain received the attention that had been waning in his later years. Typical of this attention was the great journalist H. L. Mencken’s observation (quoted in A Mencken Chrestomathy) in 1919: “The older I grow the more I am convinced that Mark was, by long odds, the largest figure that ever reared itself out of the flat, damp prairie of American literature.” Perhaps the greatest single boost to Twain’s reputation came when Ernest Hemingway, himself a deeply respected novelist and an eventual Nobel Prize winner, is said to have declared Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn to be the source of all modern American fiction.

One of the things that has always maintained the reputation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court is its appeal to many different political perspectives, even gathering together those who do not agree with one another. Some, particularly those of Twain’s own time, have seen the book as a “celebration of modern values,” as Robert Keith Miller put it in his book Mark Twain in 1983. Others, Miller points out, have considered it a condemnation of all optimism. One good example of this flexibility is the way Charles L. Sanford, in an article originally published in American Quarterly (reprinted in Readings on Mark Twain) called “A Classic of Reform Literature,” calls the novel Twain’s “symbolic attempt to persuade himself that all was right in the American garden after all.” Although Sanford says that this statement “takes into account both those critics who interpret The Connecticut Yankee as a veiled attack upon American business practices and those who take his praise of modern times at face value,” there are very few critics who would agree in characterizing Mark Twain as wishing to be self-deluded.

While Twain has always had a reputation as a master satirist, critics have had trouble identifying just what is being satirized in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. John C. Gerber, writing in his book Mark Twain, refers to the novel’s problem as “literary schizophrenia,” noting that “[o]n the surface it is a tall tale that lampoons chivalric romances, while underneath it is a compendium of Mark Twain’s increasingly gloomy thoughts about human behavior in both the past and the present.” Because of its inherent contrasts, Robert Keith Miller tells his readers, “Clearly, this is a work that deserves to be read closely.”