Tom Sawyer has taken over the Google home page.
In honor of Mark Twain's 176th birthday, Google.com proudly displayed a panoramic scene featuring one of the most famous scenes from America literature. The illustration shows Sawyer, the eponymous hero of Twain's 1876 masterpiece The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, whitewashing a picket fence with a friend. Well, really, Swayer is giving orders while the friend does all the work. In the first of three mini-scenes that span the length of the doodle, Sawyer can be seen bringing a can of whitewash to his friend, standing with his brush at the ready. In the second scene, the friend is painting away, slathering white over the Google logo's colorful letters, while Sawyer snacks on an apple and oversees. By the third scene, the fence is nearly complete, and the exhausted painter can be seen sitting exhaustedly in the grass as Sawyer enthusiastically approves of a job well done.
(In Twain's version, Tom Sawyer is charged by his Aunt Polly to whitewash a fence, but the mischievous boy enlists his friends to do the work for him so he can enjoy a day off.)
Writes the Washington Post, "The Doodle's folksy style can be read as a nod to original Twain illustrator True Williams."
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his penname, Mark Twain, was born November 30, 1835, and lived until April 21, 1910. Over the course of his life, he worked as a typesetter, a newspaperman and a Mississippi riverboat pilot before becoming one of the most celebrated authors in the U.S.
According to the website managed by the author's estate,
Clemens' pseudonym, Mark Twain, comes from his days as a river pilot. It is a river term which means two fathoms or 12-feet when the depth of water for a boat is being sounded. "Mark twain" means that is safe to navigate.
Some of Twain's other celebrated works include The Innocents Abroad (1869) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and The Prince and the Pauper (1881). Twain's autobiography, published at his behest in 2010, was a "smash hit" when released, the New York Times reports.
Watch the video (below) for a look at Google's tribute to Mark Twain, and click through the rest of the slideshow to see more of Google's mot amazing doodles ever.
