<P> It is possible to see the book as an important transitional work for Twain, in that earlier, sunnier passages recall the frontier humor of his tall tales such as The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, while the corrosive view of human behavior in the apocalyptic latter chapters is more akin to darker, later Twain works such as The Mysterious Stranger and Letters from the Earth . </P> <P> George Hardy notes, "The final scenes of' Connecticut Yankee' depict a mass horse attempting to storm a position defended by wire and machine guns--and getting massacred, none reaching their objective . Deduct the fantasy anachronism of the assailants being Medieval knights, and you get a chillingly accurate prediction of a typical First World War battle...The modern soldiers of 1914 with their bayonets had no more chance to win such a fight than Twain's knights". </P> <P> One frequently overlooked aspect of the book is the emotional intensity felt by Hank towards his family: wife Sandy and baby Hello - Central . Twain's own son, Langdon, died of diphtheria at the age of 19 months, which was likely reflected in Hello - Central's membranous croup . Twain also outlived two of his three daughters, but they both died after the completion of "Yankee ." The last chapters of the book are full of Hank's pronouncements of love, culminating in his final delirium, where "an abyss of thirteen centuries yawning between me and you!" is worse than death . </P> <P> While Connecticut Yankee is sometimes credited as the foundational work in the time travel subgenre of science fiction, Twain's novel had several important immediate predecessors . Among them are H.G. Wells's story "The Chronic Argonauts" (1888), which was a precursor to The Time Machine (1895). Also published the year before Connecticut Yankee was Edward Bellamy's wildly popular Looking Backward (1888), in which the protagonist is put into a hypnosis - induced sleep and wakes up in the year 2000 . Yet another American novel that could have served as a more direct inspiration to Twain was The Fortunate Island (1882) by Charles Heber Clark . In this novel, a technically proficient American is shipwrecked on an island that broke off from Britain during Arthurian times, and never developed any further . </P>

Connecticut yankee in the court of king arthur