#mark_twain

Mark Twain

Satirical and nostalgic, Mark Twain’s epic masterpiece, the Adventures of Tom Sawyer, brings out the inequities of adult reality from beneath the innocence of childhood. 

Today’s Google Doodle celebrates Mark Twain’s birthday with a great doodle of Tom Sawyer and the iconic white fence from the story.

Sholes and Glidden typewriter

Now I come to an important matter — as I regard it. In the year ‘74 the young woman copied a considerable part of a book of mine on the machine. In a previous chapter of this Autobiography I have claimed that I was the first person in the world that ever had a telephone in the house for practical purposes; I will now claim — until dispossess — that I was the first person in the world to apply the type-machine to literature. That book must have been The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. I wrote the first half of it in ‘72, the rest of it in ‘74. My machinist type-copied a book for me in ‘74, so I concluded it was that one. That early machine was full of caprices, full of defects — devilish ones. It had as many immoralities as the machine of today has virtues. After a year or two I found that it was degrading my character, so I thought I would give it to Howells. He was reluctant, for he was suspicious of novelties and unfriendly toward them, and he remains so to this day. But I persuaded him. He had great confidence in me, and I got him to believe things about the machine that I did not believe myself. He took it home to Boston, and my morals began to improve, but his have never recovered.