Imagine you’re a country woman sending your 17 year old son off to work in St Louis, the big city. Now imagine that, after a couple of months of silence, you get a letter in the mailbox saying that your son has bolted to New York City.

That’s exactly what happened to the mother Mark Twain in 1853.

The young and intrepid Mark Twain was off and running on a life adventure that would find him experiencing America from the wild west hills of California to the New York Island and beyond.

That first adventure, it seems, was a good one. After heading to St Louis and not finding much in the way of work or excitement, the 17 year old Sam Clemens headed to New York and landed himself a room in a boarding house on Duane Street, in lower Manhattan, and a job as a compositor in the burgeoning penny newspaper warren known as Newspaper Row, east of City Hall Park and quite near to the busy docks and industry of New York City’s seaport of the time – now South Street Seaport.

“Well, I was out of work in St. Louis, and didn’t fancy loafing in such a dry place, where there is no pleasure to be seen without paying well for it,” wrote young Sam in the summer of 1853, “and so I thought I might as well go to New York. I packed up my duds and left for this village, where I arrived, all right, this morning.”

Biographers say it was his plan to go there all along. He had a few dollars in his pocket, a ten dollar bill sewn in his jacket, and enough of a stash to take the train east.

1853 was the year Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener was published. Leaves of Grass was a year away from being published. But for seventeen year old Clemens, his publishing days were well in the future. He was a kid working in the bowels of the publishing business, at John A Grey’s printing house at 97 Cliff Street. A journeyman printer, his was a mechanical job, one old Bartleby might have decided he preferred not to do. He set type in boxes for newspapers and magazines.

Not that Downtown Sam complained about the job -- it paid 23 cents per 1,000 ems of type. “I did very well to get a place at all, for there are thirty or forty, yes fifty, good printers in the city with no work at all,” he told his mother in the letter. One of forty compositors, he helped compose the plates for the Knickerbocker, the New York Recorder, Choral Advocate, Jewish Chronicle, Littell’s Living Age and other papers and periodicals, ‘besides an immense number of books.”

And he liked the view from the fifth floor, where he worked, calling it a ‘pretty good view of the shipping beyond the Battery, and ‘the forest of masts,” with all sorts of flags flying.’ “You have everything in the shape of water craft, from a fishing smack to the steamships and men of war, but packed so closely together for miles, that when close to them you can scarcely distinguish one from the other,” he wrote.

Twain was less impressed with his accommodations on Duane Street, a place he called a villainous mechanics boarding house.' Seems the food they served to residents didn’t include hot bread biscuits.

Worse still was his walk to and from work, through what was then one of Manhattan’s slum areas. Ever the cynic, he complained about the number of kids he had to walk through to get to and from work -- up Frankfort to Nassau Street. ‘I think I could count two hundred brats,” he explained in the letter. “To wade through this mass of human vermin would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”

Twain also complained about crossing Broadway. “My plan is to get into the crowd, and when I get in, I am borne, and rubbed, and crowded along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs. And when I get out, it seems like I had been pulled to pieces and very badly put together again.”

But he liked New York City’s markets. “I was in what is known as one of THE finest fruit saloons in the world. It is a perfect palace,” he declared. “The gas lamps hang in clusters of half a dozen altogether, all over the hall.”

It was Mark Twain’s first visit to New York, and it lasted four months. The next letter Mrs. Clemens got from her son back in Hannibal, he was gone – to Philadelphia. But he’d had his first bite of Manhattan’s Big Apple, enough to whet his appetite to return to live in New York City again in his later years. Downtown Sam: Mark Twain In Lower Manhattan.

Imagine that you’re living in rural Missouri, and you’ve sent your 17 year old son off to work in St Louis, the big city. Now imagine that, a couple of months later, you get a letter in the mailbox saying that he was in New York and had a job.

That’s exactly what the mother of Samuel Clemens, aka Mark Twain, experienced in the year 1853.

The young and intrepid Mark Twain was off and running on a life adventure that would find him experiencing America from the wild west hills of California to the New York Island and beyond.

That first adventure, it seems, was a good one. After heading to St Louis and not finding much in the way of work or excitement, the 17 year old Sam Clemens headed to New York and landed himself a room in a boarding house on Duane Street, in lower Manhattan, and a job as a compositor in the burgeoning penny newspaper warren known as Newspaper Row, east of City Hall Park and quite near to the busy docks and industry of New York City’s seaport of the time – now South Street Seaport.

“Well, I was out of work in St. Louis, and didn’t fancy loafing in such a dry place, where there is no pleasure to be seen without paying well for it,” wrote young Sam in the summer of 1853, “and so I thought I might as well go to New York. I packed up my duds and left for this village, where I arrived, all right, this morning.” Biographers say it was his plan to go there all along. He had a few dollars in his pocket, a ten dollar bill sewn in his jacket, and enough of a stash to take the train east.

1853 was the year Herman Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener was published. Leaves of Grass was a year away from being published. But for seventeen year old Clemens, his publishing days were well in the future. He was a kid working in the bowels of the publishing business, at John A Grey’s printing house at 97 Cliff Street. A journeyman printer, his was a mechanical job, one old Bartleby might have decided he preferred not to do. He set type in boxes for newspapers and magazines.

Not that Downtown Sam complained about the job -- it paid 23 cents per 1,000 ems of type. “I did very well to get a place at all, for there are thirty or forty, yes fifty, good printers in the city with no work at all,” he told his mother in the letter. One of forty compositors, he helped compose the plates for the Knickerbocker, the New York Recorder, Choral Advocate, Jewish Chronicle, Littell’s Living Age and other papers and periodicals, ‘besides an immense number of books.”

And he liked the view from the fifth floor, where he worked, calling it a ‘pretty good view of the shipping beyond the Battery, and ‘the forest of masts,” with all sorts of flags flying.’ “You have everything in the shape of water craft, from a fishing smack to the steamships and men of war, but packed so closely together for miles, that when close to them you can scarcely distinguish one from the other,” he wrote.

Twain was less impressed with his accommodations on Duane Street, a place he called a villainous mechanics boarding house.' Seems the food they served to residents didn’t include hot bread biscuits.

Worse still was his walk to and from work, through what was then one of Manhattan’s slum areas. Ever the cynic, he complained about the number of kids he had to walk through to get to and from work -- up Frankfort to Nassau Street. ‘I think I could count two hundred brats,” he explained in the letter. “To wade through this mass of human vermin would raise the ire of the most patient person that ever lived.”

Twain also complained about crossing Broadway. “My plan is to get into the crowd, and when I get in, I am borne, and rubbed, and crowded along, and need scarcely trouble myself about using my own legs. And when I get out, it seems like I had been pulled to pieces and very badly put together again.”

But he liked New York City’s markets. “I was in what is known as one of THE finest fruit saloons in the world. It is a perfect palace,” he declared. “The gas lamps hang in clusters of half a dozen altogether, all over the hall.”

It was Mark Twain’s first visit to New York, and it lasted four months. The next letter Mrs. Clemens got from her son back in Hannibal, he was gone – to Philadelphia. But he’d had his first bite of Manhattan’s Big Apple, enough to whet his appetite to return to live in New York City again in his later years.

In fact, he came back to the big city fourteen years later, having established a reputation as a newspaperman, frontier humorist and lecturer, and budding story writer, he came to the attention of the Bohemian crowd then collected at the cellar bar Pfaff’s – in particular Henry Clapp, ‘King Of The Bohemians’ and editor of the Saturday Press, who published his story The Jumping Frog of Calaveras County, first titled "Jim Smiley and his Jumping Frog."

The year was 1867 and it was a big year for Twain – not only did the story spread like wildfire, but he also had a number of seminal moments. Among them: he delivered one of his patented ‘serio-comic lectures’ at Cooper Union, dazzling the crowd with his deadpan wit and stage presence; he sailed from a Hudson River pier at the foot of Wall Street (117 Wall St) aboard the Quaker City, a sidewheeler engaged to bring American tourists abroad, on a journey to the Holy Land that would become immortalized in his book ‘Innocents Abroad’ and establish his claim as a novelist; and he met and married his wife, a young lady from Elmyra NY whose father had befriended Twain aboard the Quaker City.

The final chapter of Twain’s life in New York City centers around Washington Square, where he lived in the twilight of his years. An inveterate speculator who enjoyed the same kind of boom and bust vicissitudes that the nation experience in the 1800s, the author established a number of residences – including a home at 14 E 10th St, just off University Ave, a structure rented out for him by Doubleday, who lived around the corner. Here he welcomed a steady stream of well wishers – including Rudyard Kipling, who according to one story, walked down to Washington Square and sat with Twain for a full hour on a park bench, shooting the breeze.

It was also in this area that Twain established the custom of wearing a white suit, and strolled up and down the boulevards of Manhattan contemplating the admiration of the world.

Twain eventually moved away – first to Wave Hill, in the Bronx, and thene upcountry to a small home in Connecticut.

But his connection to Manhattan endured. A fitting illustration of this lasting connection to New York City is the fact that, at his death, Twain lay in state in the Brick Presbyterian Church at Fifth Avenue and 37th Street.

In the Big Apple, that is --the town he ran away to at the tender age of 17.