Mark Twain is the latest personage to be honoured by Google through its Doodle on his 176th birthday.
The author, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was a writer and speaker of international renown in his time and his fame has grown in giant leaps ever since.
His tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are childhood favourites of most readers. Yet it is the philosophy and social commentary that Twain confronted us with through his simple stories of rural boys which continues to fascinate his fans, young and old, to this day.
The sequence of images highlights the key points of his most famous Tom Sawyer story - The whitewashing of the fence.
Sawyer, who was assigned the job of whitewashing a fence, does not feel like doing it.
With a deep understanding of human psychology and the nature of 'work', Sawyer manages to convince all the neighbourhood children to paint the fence for him.
He does this by simply pretending that he was having the time of his life painting it, all the while informing the watching children that whitewashing, unlike playing or swimming, was a rare event in a person's life which should not be missed.
Sawyer does such a good job of convincing the kids of the joy of whitewashing that they even give him small bribes for a chance to whitewash the fence. The fence soon has several layers of whitewash with no contribution from Sawyer.
Twain ended the tale with a simple but profound thought - Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Such tales, anecdotes and one-liners make Twain's wit as crisp today as when they were first shown to the world.
Twain once predicted that as he was born in 1835, when Hailey's Comet passed the Earth, he would probably die when it came back. As he predicted, at the age of 74, Twain died from a heart attack on April 21, 1910
The author, whose real name was Samuel Langhorne Clemens, was a writer and speaker of international renown in his time and his fame has grown in giant leaps ever since.
His tales of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer are childhood favourites of most readers. Yet it is the philosophy and social commentary that Twain confronted us with through his simple stories of rural boys which continues to fascinate his fans, young and old, to this day.
The sequence of images highlights the key points of his most famous Tom Sawyer story - The whitewashing of the fence.
Sawyer, who was assigned the job of whitewashing a fence, does not feel like doing it.
With a deep understanding of human psychology and the nature of 'work', Sawyer manages to convince all the neighbourhood children to paint the fence for him.
He does this by simply pretending that he was having the time of his life painting it, all the while informing the watching children that whitewashing, unlike playing or swimming, was a rare event in a person's life which should not be missed.
Sawyer does such a good job of convincing the kids of the joy of whitewashing that they even give him small bribes for a chance to whitewash the fence. The fence soon has several layers of whitewash with no contribution from Sawyer.
Twain ended the tale with a simple but profound thought - Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.
Such tales, anecdotes and one-liners make Twain's wit as crisp today as when they were first shown to the world.
Twain once predicted that as he was born in 1835, when Hailey's Comet passed the Earth, he would probably die when it came back. As he predicted, at the age of 74, Twain died from a heart attack on April 21, 1910
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