A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in 1835, in the ‘almost invisible’ village of Florida, Missouri, and raised in Hannibal, Missouri, on the banks of the great Mississippi river. He worked as a printer’s apprentice, steamboat pilot and miner before beginning to write sketches and stories under the pen name ‘Mark Twain’. He married Olivia Langdon in 1870, and the couple moved to Hartford, Connecticut, where Twain wrote his most famous novels. He published prolifically until his death and cultivated both a public persona – complete with white suit and cigar – and an immediately recognisable tone: deadpan, colloquial, unselfconscious. His later years were marked by the death of his wife and two of his children, and by disastrous investments, but he remained beloved by the reading public all over the world.

David Hughes is an artist and illustrator. He studied at Twickenham College of Technology, earning a first class honours degree in illustration, and went on to work as a graphic designer at Granada Television in Manchester. He left Granada in 1985 to become a full-time illustrator, earning commissions from Walker Books, the Observer Magazine and The New Yorker, among others. In 1999 he won the D&AD Silver Award for his illustrations for Othello, and in 2010 Walking the Dog, his graphic novel about the daily life of an illustrator, won the Association of Illustrators Critic's Award. For The Folio Society he has illustrated Count Belisarius (2010), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court (2012) and Juvenal's The Sixteen Satires (2014).