Like Hank Morgan, Mark Twain returned to the nineteenth century in the aftermath of A Connecticut Yankee. Beyond returning to a familiar era and the familiar geography of the United States, he also returned to the character Colonel Mulberry Sellers, whose hare-brained scheming and good-natured idiocies had helped initiate Twain's first attempt at book-length narrative fiction in partnership with Charles Dudley Warner. Sellers was the only element of The Gilded Age that continued to occupy Twain's imagination. John T. Raymond's successful portrayal of Sellers in a stage adaptation had reinvigorated Twain's interest in writing a sequel featuring the madcap opportunist. But the play entitled Colonel Sellers as a Scientist, which Twain wrote in collaboration with Howells in 1883, lay dormant because Howells was embarrassed by the farce. In 1884, around the same time that the initial idea for A Connecticut Yankee emerged, Twain decided to convert the Sellers play into a novel. But with A Connecticut Yankee absorbing his literary energy during the 1880s, he didn't get around to this conversion until 1891.

After betting on the subversive critical energy of the novel against the authority of history in A Connecticut Yankee and losing, Twain found the Sellers farce an attractive mode. He mustered a desperate and cynical stand in this last complete dialectical stage.