Samuel Langhorne Clemens, aka Mark Twain, is trending on what would have been his 176th birthday.
Google is paying homepage homage with a doodle depicting the classic whitewashing fence scene from Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, and Twitter users are tweeting their favorite Twain quotes.
Born in Hannibal, Mo. in 1835, Mark Twain was known for his satiric wit, social criticism, and outspoken support of abolition and women’s rights.
His follow-up to Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, established him as a great American writer and the novel remains required reading in most U.S. high schools today. Ernest Hemingway would later write that all modern American literature comes from one book: Huckleberry Finn.
Twain died of a heart attack in 1910 at the age of 74.
