A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court Annotated Book

Book excerpt: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a "framed story." That is, the first chapter tells how a tourist in England, presumably Mark Twain, meets a stranger who tells him part of his story and then gives him a manuscript that tells the rest of his strange tale. In the last chapter, the tourist has finished reading the manuscript and searches out the stranger, only to find him dying and calling out for the wife and daughter whom he had lived with in sixth-century England.In the first chapter, this stranger (we later learn that his name is Hank Morgan, but he is usually referred to in the novel as The Boss) tells the tourist that he was something of a jack-of-all-trades who had a particular aptitude for making and inventing things mechanical. He is from Hartford, Connecticut, where he had been head superintendent in a munitions factory until, in a fight with one of the workers, he was hit in the head with a crowbar. When he awakened, he was sitting in the grass under a tree. A man in old-fashioned armor took him prisoner, and they rode off to what Hank Morgan believed would probably be an insane asylum. At this point in the story, this stranger begins to feel very sleepy, so he gives the tourist the manuscript detailing his adventures, which he has written from the journals that he kept.