Google doodles for Mark Twain

If you go to Google.com today, you will see a stretched out logo in the form of a fence and the images of six children. Google’s celebrating the 176th birthday of American author, Mark Twain by illustrating one of the most famous scenes from arguably his most famous book, “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”. In today’s doodle, Google’s drawn out the whitewashing the fence scene from Tom Sawyer, where the little truant protagonist gets other kids in the neighbourhood to whitewash his fence, a punishment assigned to him by his aunt Polly. Sawyer sells the activity of whitewashing the fence as something fun, thereby getting other children to do it for him, one even offering Sawyer an apple to have a chance at whitewashing.

The Doodle for Twain

Twain was born Samuel Longhorn Clemens on the 30th of November, 1835 in Missouri, USA. The town he grew up in, Hannibal, Missouri, was the inspiration for the setting of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” and his other famous book, “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. The two books were released in 1876 and 1885 respectively, the latter being known as “The Great American Novel”. Sawyer died on the 21st of April, 1910 after suffering a heart attack. In 1909, he was quoted saying, “I came in with Halley’s Comet in 1835. It is coming again next year, and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my life if I don’t go out with Halley’s Comet. The Almighty has said, no doubt: ‘Now here are these two unaccountable freaks; they came in together, they must go out together.” He died one day after the comet’s closest presence to the planet.