Author Mark Twain’s 176th Birthday Celebrated on Google with ‘Tom Sawyer’ Fence Whitewashing Scene (video)
Posted By Vicki McClure Davidson on November 30, 2011
A charming Google doodle on the search engine’s homepage today, which honors the 176th birthday of American author and humorist Samuel Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain. It captures the famous fence whitewashing scene — “thirty yards of board fence nine feet high” — from Twain’s celebrated 1876 novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.
Unlike other commemorative doodles, this one is panoramic with three scenes, spanning the width of the screen. Click the image below to enlarge.
The PBS website has the text from the novel of the delightful whitewashing chapter where Tom snookers another boy, Ben Rogers, to whitewash paint the fence for him by making it seem more fun than going swimming. Twain has often been called “the father of American literature.” Here are the final two paragraphs from that chapter:
Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign.
The boy mused awhile over the substantial change which had taken place in his worldly circumstances, and then wended toward headquarters to report.
From Washington Post, MARK TWAIN GOOGLE DOODLE: Panoramic ‘Tom Sawyer’ logo colorfully celebrates legendary Clemens:
Today, America’s finest humorist gets one of America’s finest Google tributes.
And given the full, screen-sweeping beauty of a small-town scene, reports of its breadth are not greatly exaggerated.
To celebrate the 176th anniversary of Mark Twain’s Missouri birth Wednesday, Google paints its logo in perhaps the most fitting way possible: By using its patented “Doodle” to render the world of Twain’s Tom Sawyer, who famously cajoled friends to whitewash a fence for him.
[...]
Samuel Langhorne Clemens came into this world with Halley’s Comet on Nov. 30, 1835, in Florida, Mo., and his family soon moved to the nearby Hannibal that was the model setting for so many of his literary adventures. Clemens was a teen printer’s apprentice, a Mississippi River steamboat pilot (fromwhence he later adopted the boating term “mark twain”), a two-week quasi-Rebel soldier and a California newspaperman before buoying his fame on the lecture circuit and settling in the East, where he married wife Livy and raised a family.
While becoming the first uniquely American great novelist, Twain also endured much personal tragedy, outliving everyone in his immediate family save one daughter (Clara Clemens died in 1962). Yet renowned Twain scholar Ron Powers once told me he thought that became part of the author’s cherished legacy: “He left us with the knowledge that you can convert sorrow to laughter … which I think became an American device.”
After becoming one of the first global media celebrities in his later years — despite some of his most bitter writings at this time, he could be counted on to dish out quotable quips and deftly spun social commentary — Twain himself died in 1910, his brilliant light extinguished right as Halley’s Comet made its earthly return.
In “Eruption,” Twain said: “Humor must not professedly teach, and it must professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.” In the simple wrinkle of truth, Twain somehow achieves the great legacy of publicly living forever.
And in “A Connecticut Yankee,” Twain wrote: “Many a small thing has been made large by the right kind of advertising.”
Mark Twain Google Doodle | November 30, 2011
From The Guardian, Mark Twain gets birthday tribute from Google:
Mark Twain’s classic scene of boyhood one-upmanship, when Tom Sawyer tricks his friends into whitewashing a fence for him, has been immortalised online by Google’s home page.
The search engine marked the 176th birthday of the American author with a Google doodle today, showing his character Tom Sawyer tempting a friend into whitewashing over the Google logo that unknown and anachronistic hands have daubed over it. In the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Tom is ordered to undertake the job by his Aunt Polly as a punishment. A “deep melancholy” settles upon him as he surveys the fence, “thirty yards of board fence nine feet high”.
When boys begin to approach and ridicule him, Tom persuades them the work is fun. “All I know, is, it suits Tom Sawyer”, he tells them. “I reckon there ain’t one boy in a thousand, maybe two thousand, that can do it the way it’s got to be done.” They take the bait and bribe him with their treasures to let them whitewash the fence for him, as “the retired artist sat on a barrel in the shade close by … literally rolling in wealth”.
[...]
Twain died in 1910 and remains one of America’s best-loved authors. His autobiography was finally released last year: Twain had specified that it remain unpublished until a century after his death, so that he might feel free to speak his “whole frank mind” as he would be “dead, and unaware, and indifferent”.
From The Telegraph, Mark Twain’s 176th birthday marked by Google Doodle mural:
Users of the search engine’s home page are greeted to the colourful drawing that appears to be based on a scene from arguably one of the late author’s best known novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
The mural, which takes up the complete width of a computer screen, in which Tom is made to whitewash a fence with his friend Ben.
In the sequence, the two boys are painting a white picket fence with the Google logo in the centre, before they celebrate their creation in the screen’s right hand side. The second G and the letter E are painted over.
The scene is when Tom paints the fence as punishment by Aunt Polly for dirtying his clothes in a fight with a boy from St Louis.
While the drawing is one of Google’s more conventional doodles in recent times, it’s also arguably one of the most beautiful to date.
Today is beloved American author Mark Twain's 176th birthday
A handful of Twain’s famous and not-so-famous quotes:
A man is never more truthful than when he acknowledges himself a liar.
Humor must not professedly teach and it must not professedly preach, but it must do both if it would live forever.
I have never let my schooling interfere with my education.
What is the difference between a taxidermist and a tax collector? The taxidermist takes only your skin.
Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand.
If man could be crossed with the cat, it would improve man but deteriorate the cat.
That’s the difference between governments and individuals. Governments don’t care, individuals do.
There are basically two types of people. People who accomplish things, and people who claim to have accomplished things. The first group is less crowded.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn’t.
The man who is a pessimist before 48 knows too much; if he is an optimist after it, he knows too little.
It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, it’s the size of the fight in the dog.
When your friends begin to flatter you on how young you look, it’s a sure sign you’re getting old.
There are lies, damned lies and statistics.
Journalism is the one solitary respectable profession which honors theft (when committed in the pecuniary interest of a journal,) & admires the thief…. However, these same journals combat despicable crimes quite valiantly — when committed in other quarters.
The government is not best which secures mere life and property — there is a more valuable thing — manhood.
Many public-school children seem to know only two dates — 1492 and 4th of July; and as a rule they don’t know what happened on either occasion.
Laughter without a tinge of philosophy is but a sneeze of humor. Genuine humor is replete with wisdom.
It is easy to find fault, if one has that disposition. There was once a man who, not being able to find any other fault with his coal, complained that there were too many prehistoric toads in it.
I think it is not wise for an emperor, or a king, or a president, to come down into the boxing ring, so to speak, and lower the dignity of his office by meddling in the small affairs of private citizens.
The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.
What is it that strikes a spark of humor from a man? It is the effort to throw off, to fight back the burden of grief that is laid on each one of us. In youth we don’t feel it, but as we grow to manhood we find the burden on our shoulders. Humor? It is nature’s effort to harmonize conditions. The further the pendulum swings out over woe the further it is bound to swing back over mirth.
Life would be infinitely happier if we could only be born at the age of eighty and gradually approach eighteen.
Update: Here’s the full-width version of today’s doodle — click the image to enlarge.
About the author
Comments