Mark Twain's progression from A Connecticut Yankee to The Mysterious Stranger

Abstract

The Mysterious Stranger manuscripts have always been set apart from Twain's earlier fiction as a consequence of the writer's aggravated pessimism in his last years and his intention to keep them unpublished. But there is a strong resemblance between these manuscripts and a novel published a decade before: A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The similarities between the main characters and their contradiction between meliorism and determinism, as well as the use of the iconoclastic power of satire against the same targets and a parallel manipulation of time and space, are all common features which help understand The Mysterious Stranger as a progression from ideas already latent in A Connecticut Yankee.