SOURCE: "A Connecticut Yankee and Industrial America: Mark Twain's Lesson," in Essays in Arts and Sciences, Vol. X, No. 2, March, 1982, pp. 197-205.

In this essay, presented in 1980 as part of a series of lectures titled "Nineteenth-Century Industry and Culture in Connecticut," Sloane discusses Mark Twain's favorable impression of American industrialism as seen in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, which he calls "Twain's most ambitious attempt to make a comprehensive dramatization of the issues surrounding democracy and industrial progress."

Mark Twain, in 1871, wryly observed of a "medieval" tournament in Brooklyn, N.Y., that it was absurd to introduce the sentimentalized brag, vanity, and mock-heroics of the medieval joust into the broad-awake city of New York and the rolling mills and factories of the Northeast.² Mark Twain was not alone among Northeastern humorists in his progressive viewpoint, for lesser writers like Max Adeler, B. P. Shillaber, and John...