Walking Tour Honors Mark Twain, the New Yorker EVENT: "Mark Twain’s New York" Walking Tour WHERE: 500 Broadway (between Broome & Spring Streets) WHEN: 1:00 PM Sunday, May 5 PRICE: $20 WEBSITE: www.MarkTwainsNewYork.com RESERVATIONS: 917-620-5371; [log in to unmask] ___________________________________________ New York City, May 1, 2013 — Just 146 years ago today, on May 1, 1867, an obscure publisher on Nassau Street released the first book by Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens), “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County and other Sketches.” To celebrate the anniversary, and the beloved humorist's many other associations with New York City, writer and Twain scholar Peter Salwen will lead a 90-minute walking tour of Mark Twain landmarks in lower Manhattan at 1:00 PM on Sunday, May 5. “Mark Twain is best known for his tales of life on the Mississippi, but he also happens to be New York’s great literary secret,” Salwen says. “In his day Twain was New York's best-known celebrity. But more importantly, the city and the people he met here played a huge part in Twain's own development as a writer and as a person. If Sam Clemens hadn’t come to our town when he did, it's safe to say there would *be* no Mark Twain — at least, not the Mark Twain we know and cherish.” “Mark Twain’s New York” starts in Lower Manhattan, where Twain published his first book and met his future wife, both in 1867, and ends at the handsome Greenwich Village mansion where he lived at the start of the 20th century. In between there will be stops at over a dozen other places where Mark Twain lived, visited, did business and generally made himself, in his own words, “the most conspicuous person on the planet.” ######