Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn,  a stage adaptation of the novel, opens to favorable reviews. Though he is credited with coauthorship, Twain has little to do with the play and never sees it performed. He receives an honorary doctorate degree from the University of Missouri.

1903   Hoping to restore Livy’s health, Twain takes her to Florence, Italy. 
1904   Livy dies, leaving Twain devastated. He begins dictating an uneven autobiography that he never finishes. 
1905   Theodore Roosevelt invites Twain to the White House. Twain enjoys a gala celebrating his seventieth birthday in New York. He continues to lecture, and he addresses Congress on copyright issues. 
1906   Twain’s biographer Albert Bigelow Paine moves in with the family. 
1907   Twain travels to Oxford University to receive an honorary Doctor of Letters degree. 
1908   He settles in Redding, Connecticut, at Stormfield, the mansion that is his final home. 
1909   Twain’s daughter Clara marries; the author dons his Oxford robe for the ceremony. His daughter Jean dies. 
1910   Twain travels to Bermuda for his health. He develops heart problems and, upon his return to Stormfield, dies, leaving behind a cache of unpublished work. 

INTRODUCTION

Mark Twain has taken his characters and readers on all kinds of trips. Huck and Jim on the raft—a poor white boy and an enslaved black man floating down a river looking for freedom—is the image with which modern readers are most likely to associate his work. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was his most popular novel during his lifetime, but among his contemporaries Twain’s best-selling books were literal travel books, and he was better known as a travel writer than as a novelist. Between 1869 and 1897 he published The Innocents Abroad, about his trip east to Europe and the Holy Land with the Quaker City pilgrims; Roughing It, about his earlier adventures going west to the Nevada Territory, California, and Hawaii; A Tramp Abroad, which takes readers with him to Europe again; Life on the Mississippi, in which he returns to the river he had grown up beside and worked on as a steamboat pilot; and finally Following the Equator, in which he travels around the whole world. He imagined even more amazing trips in the books he began but could not finish during the last dozen years of his life: on a comet to heaven, across a germ-filled drop of water under a microscope, through the bloodstream of a drunken tramp. But none of his characters take a stranger trip than Hank Morgan, who gets hit on the head in a factory in Hartford in 1879 and wakes up to find himself just outside Camelot in the year 528.

A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court may be the world’s first novel about time travel. It certainly has the most fantastic plot of all Twain’s fictions. But the inspiration to send a modern American through time as well as space sprang directly out of Twain’s long-standing literary goals. The story of the story begins on a Saturday in December 1884, with Twain traveling around the country on a reading tour to promote Huck Finn. In a bookstore in Rochester, New York, George Washington Cable, his fellow novelist and partner on the tour, suggested that Le Morte d’Arthur (The Death of Arthur), Sir Thomas Malory’s classic romance about the knights of the Round Table, would make good reading matter for the trip. Twain bought the book, began reading it the next day, and shortly afterward made a note in his journal about an idea for a sketch:

Dream of being a knight errant in armor in the middle ages. Have the notions & habits of thought of the present day mixed with the necessities of that. No pockets in the armor. No way to manage certain requirements of nature. Can’t scratch. Cold in the head—cant blow—can’t get a handkerchief, can’t use iron sleeve.

The emphasis here is on the idea’s comic possibilities. The literary goal Twain’s audience always expected him to put first was making them laugh. As a professional humorist, he learned early that people are much more likely to laugh when they’re nervous or uncomfortable. Sex, for example, that staple of modern stand-up, is not inherently funny, but it is a subject to which almost everyone attaches some degree of discomfort. The mores of Twain’s late-Victorian America ruled out sex as a subject; people laugh when they’re anxious, not when they’re offended or shocked. But the principle of making an audience uneasy enough to laugh applies to any subject in which they are emotionally over-invested, and his culture’s proprieties and evasions gave Twain many other opportunities to make his audience uneasy. One of his favorite strategies was treating something they considered sacred in a mocking or irreverent spirit. A knight in shining armor was a subject that you were supposed to approach on bended knees. If, while looking up at that knight, you notice his nose is running, the disequilibrium caused by this clash between the sacred and the profane, between what a culture enshrines and what it represses, will probably seek to discharge itself through laughter.