Happy Birthday to Mark Twain

Mark Twain - Photo by A.F. Bradley, New York, 1907

Today Google honored Mark Twain's 176th Birthday with a doodle of Tom Sawyer and his hoodwinked friend whitewashing a fence. That got us thinking about Mark Twain, one of the great literary minds of our time, and how he may have felt about lawyers. It comes as no surprise that someone whose great fame grew from his wit and humor would be so proficient at telling great lawyer jokes. 

What may come as a surprise is that his father was a lawyer and a judge. And Mark Twain (real name: Samuel Clemens) had lawyers of his own. He was represented by the firm Howard, Kohn, Sprague and FitzGerald in Hartford, Connecticut, the city where Twain would write his most famous works including The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. While his lawyer, Charles Perkins, has long since passed away, the law firm continues to operate in Hartford today. For his own lawyer, Twain had a great deal of respect, once calling him "the best lawyer in Hartford."

So we would like to thank Mark Twain on this anniversary of his birth for his lighthearted humor, the great literature he gave our country, and for going easy on the lawyer jokes.