Mark Twain's New York

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A walking tour of Mark Twain
landmarks in Manhattan

Mark Twain's New York - some highlights of our tour

The luxurious St. Nicholas Hotel was popular with visitors from the West. It was here in December 1867, probably in the dining room at right, that Twain first met the "sweet and timid and lovely young girl" he would marry two years later after a determined & passionate courtship.
Charles Pfaff's beer cellar on lower Broadway was the favored haunt of a mid-19th-century bohemian coterie that included Walt Whitman, editor Henry Clapp, Jr., and the country's favorite humorist, Artemus Ward; Ward's friendship and support led directly to publication of the celebrated "Jumping Frog" story in Clapp's Saturday Press -- the young Mark Twain's first giant step toward national renown.
500 Broadway was home to The Galaxy, a popular literary monthly that published many of Mark Twain's funniest early short pieces, later published in his 1875 collection Sketches New & Old. Fun fact: 30 years later Galaxy editor Frank Church (then on staff at the New York Sun) would pen an editorial including the imperishable line, "Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus."
Twain launched his 30-year career as the country's favorite humorous speaker with a performance at Cooper Union in 1867. Abraham Lincoln had used the same venue a few years earlier to "make his mark in New York" and win the visibility that helped bring him to the White House.
Twain and his family lived at 14 West 10th Street at the start of his last decade. "One could never describe the atmosphere of adulation that swept across the threshold," his daughter recalled. (The front stoop, a magnet for neighborhood boys in Twain's day, has since been removed.)
The electrical genius Nicola Tesla was a fervent admirer of Twain, whose books, Tesla believed, had cured him of mysterious boyhood illnesses. Twain likewise admired Tesla, whose invention of alternating current "will revolutionize the whole electric business of the world." This photo of Twain in Tesla's downtown Manhattan lab was one of the first ever taken with phosphorescent light.
Also of interest, but not on the basic tour:

Mark Twain's first book, a collection of humorous newspaper pieces, was published May 1, 1867 by C.H Webb, Publisher, 119-121 Nassau St. The title story, "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County," had appeared for the first time in the November 18, 1865 issue of The New York Saturday Press.
The Players - the celebrated theatrical club on Gramercy Park South. Twain was a co-founder of the club and was a frequent guest, especially on visits to the city in the 1890s, when he and his family were mostly resident in Europe.
After a year on West 10th Street, the Clemens family
leased the mansion now known as Wave Hill, overlooking the Hudson in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, from publisher William Henry Appleton and made it their home (and a glittering literary salon) in the years 1901-03. Jean Clemens, Twain's youngest daughter, snapped this picture.