In the early twentieth century, Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court was required reading at union meetings. While it lacked the social and moral clarity of an Upton Sinclair or John Steinbeck novel, it’s not hard to see the connection. At one point in Twain’s folksy time-travel novel, which follows the adventures of modern man Hank Morgan after he’s transported to Arthurian England, Morgan predicts that the lowly Medieval peasant “will rise up and take a hand at fixing his wage himself.”

Twain’s massive body of work and legendary status in American cultural history makes it difficult to parse truth from myth. For example, the quote “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes” is often attributed to Twain, though he never actually said it. But a few things are certain about Twain. We know that he was an uncannily sharp wit, a keen social observer, and an influential presence in American culture and politics during his lifetime. More overlooked but no less certain is that, while no revolutionary himself, Twain held strong pro-labor views, which are particularly evident in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.

“And now here I was,” Hank Morgan observes, standing before toiling Medieval laborers he meets in Camelot, where 99 percent of people “furnished all the money and did all the work,” and the rest “elected themselves a permanent board of direction and took all the dividends.” To Morgan, Twain’s stand-in, “what these dupes needed was a new deal.” Indeed, the novel’s critique of Gilded Age (a term Twain coined) excess was so recognizable that this line inspired the name of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal.