SOHO — Broadway's retail strip is bound to be clogged with post-Thanksgiving shoppers on Saturday. But one group of amblers will be search of literary history, not bargains.
Days before Mark Twain's Nov. 30 birthday, expert Peter Salwen will lead a walking tour through SoHo and Greenwich Village stopping at key places in the life of the author and humorist.
People tend to associate Twain with the landscapes of "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer," but Twain was a New Yorker, said Salwen, a 67-year-old Upper West Side resident who has been leading Twain tours since 1985.
"Mark Twain spent more of his life near the Hudson River than he did near the Mississippi," he said.
Saturday's tour, which will begin at 499 Broadway at 1 p.m., will start along a stretch of Broadway between Bleecker and Broome streets. Participants will see the former site of the publisher who turned down Twain's first collection of stories; the hotel where Twain met his wife, Olivia Langdon Clemens; and a publishing house Twain owned in the 1880s and 1890s.
From SoHo, the group will walk to 14 W. 10th Street, the site of a home where Twain lived at the turn of the century.
Twain wrote about Manhattan's appeal in an 1853 letter home, which is his oldest surviving manuscript, Salwen said.
“I have taken a liking to the abominable place, and every time I get ready to leave, I put it off a day or so, from some unaccountable cause," Twain wrote.
Salwen said he would like for Broadway between Bleecker and Broome streets to be dedicated as "Mark Twain Way."
"I'd like to see Twain appreciated for the quintessentially American writer he was," Salwen said.
Tickets for the Twain tour, which cost $20 each, can be reserved by emailing Salwen at mtny@salwen.com or calling 917-620-5371.
