Google Doodle pays tribute to Mark Twain

Today’s Google homepage greets you with a unique doodle that stretches all across the width of the page. Google paid tribute to the American writer Mark Twain on his 176th birth anniversary today.

The doodle immortalises a classic scene from Twain’s best known novel, The Adventures Of Tom Sawyer.

In the novel, Tom is ordered to whitewash a fence by his Aunt Polly as punishment. A “deep melancholy” settles upon him as he surveys the fence, “thirty yards of board fence nine feet high”. But Tom cleverly persuades his friends to trade him small treasures for the privilege of painting a fence.

The doodle shows Tom Sawyer tempting a friend into whitewashing over the Google logo, while he directs him.

One of America’s most loved and respected writers, Mark Twain’s notable works include, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), The Innocents Abroad (1869), Roughing It (1872), and Life on the Mississippi (1883).