In honor of Mark Twain’s 176th birthday, Google has posted a panoramic painted Doodle, featuring the world of Tom Sawyer. The Doodle, which replaces the search engine’s official logo on its homepage, includes the writer’s legendary character persuading his friends to whitewash the Google logo.
The Doodle also features other characters from Twain’s most memorable books, ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’ and ‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ The illustration’s folksy style also pays tribute to the author’s illustrator, True Williams.
Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on November 30, 1835 in Florida, Missouri. His family then moved to the nearby Hannibal, which served as the model setting where many of his books where set. Before becoming a writer, Twain worked as a printer’s apprentice as a teen, and later as a Mississippi River steamboat pilot, a quasi-Rebel soldier and a California newspaperman. He later gained fame on the lecture circuit, before setting in the East and marrying his wife Livy and starting a family.
As a writer, Twain also garnered praise for his novels ‘Roughing It,’ ‘The Innocents Abroad,’ ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ and ‘A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.’ His comic sketch, ‘The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County,’ helped make the writer famous.
In 1909, a year before his death, Twain predicted that he would die with the next Halley’s Comet, as he was born with it’s appearance in 1835. The writer’s predication came true, as he suffered a heart attack on April 21, 1910 in Redding, Connecticut, one day after the comet’s closest approach to Earth.
Written by: Karen Benardello
