Why am I passionate about this?
As an author of historical fiction set in Upper Michigan and a seventh-generation resident of Marquette, I’ve always wished I had a time machine so I could travel back to see what Upper Michigan looked like when my French voyageur ancestors traveled the Great Lakes in the 1600s and when my Marquette ancestors helped found the town in 1849. Since I haven’t learned how to invent a time machine yet, the next best thing was to write a time travel novel. To begin, I tried to pick one Marquette history event I wanted to change—the dramatic 1903 move of the Longyear Mansion from Marquette to Massachusetts.
Tyler's book list on time travel with characters who try to change history
Why did Tyler love this book?
This novel may seem an odd choice since King Arthur is likely more fictional than historical, yet Mark Twain, for all his humor, uses the novel as a satire upon the wrongs of capitalism and his late nineteenth-century society.
Hank Morgan, the Connecticut Yankee, intentionally tries to change history by making medieval England a better place. He does this by trying to rid the land of superstition and the hold that charlatans like Merlin have over the country, but he is also a complex character who is not unwilling to use medieval superstition to his advantage.
By the end of the novel, he has turned medieval England into a medieval version of the nineteenth-century complete with modern inventions including the bicycle and telephone. However, the most memorable scene occurs when Hank and King Arthur travel the country in disguise and end up enslaved and nearly hanged.
The experience causes King…
4 authors picked A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
In this classic satiric novel, published in 1889, Hank Morgan, a supervisor in a Connecticut gun factory, falls unconscious after being whacked on the head. When he wakes up he finds himself in Britain in 528 — where he is immediately captured, hauled back to Camelot to be exhibited before the knights of King Arthur's Round Table, and sentenced to death. Things are not looking good.
But Hank is a quick-witted and enterprising fellow, and in the process of saving his life he turns himself into a celebrity of the highest magnitude. His Yankee ingenuity and knowledge of the world…