Writing (and Riding) the Waves: Inside the History of “Surf Lit”

The psyche of a surfer is not a terribly complicated thing to wrap your mind around. First, imagine a toddler let loose in an open field. Now install at one end of this field a bubble machine. Add a gentle breeze. The frolic that ensues, the wild yips and leaps of ecstasy, the breathless thrill every time a ball of liquid light bursts on the fingertips—there’s the essence of it.

Increasingly, and in reputable circles, I’ve heard the phrase “surf literature” spoken out loud, and without a trace of irony. It seems to me a bit of a stretch to bank a genre on the theme of children chasing bubbles. Nonetheless, scribes have been wrestling waves and their riders onto the page for at least a few centuries now, with mixed results.

Eighteenth-century explorers and missionaries to the Pacific Islands—hypnotized by the sight of natives hauling their wooden planks out to sea and gliding back to shore on the incoming swell—were baffled by the idea that such a frivolous activity afforded these people places of eminence in their community. And yet, after observing one native’s behavior, William Anderson, a surgeon on James Cook’s 1777 expedition to Tahiti, tapped into this basic truth: “I could not help concluding that this man felt the most supreme pleasure while he was driven on, so fast and so smoothly, by the sea.”

One of the best arguments for the legitimacy of the genre is that surfing has its own idiosyncratic language, a patois, and fully inhabits its own universe.

In 1907, Jack London visited Waikiki and paddled out with some locals, including George Freeth, who, along with Duke Kahanamoku, is largely credited for introducing the sport to the mainland. Here’s London, waxing purple in “A Royal Sport: Surfing in Waikiki”:

And suddenly, out there where a big smoker lifts skyward, rising like a sea-god from out of the welter of spume and churning white, on the giddy toppling, overhanging and downfalling, precarious crest appears the dark head of a man. Swiftly he rises through the rushing white…not buried and crushed and buffeted by those mighty monsters, but standing above them all, calm and superb, poised on the giddy summit, his feet buried in the churning foam, the salt smoke rising to his knees, and all the rest of him in the free air and flashing sunlight, and he is flying through the air, flying forward, flying fast as the surge on which he stands. He is a Mercury—a brown Mercury. His heels are winged, and in them is the swiftness of the sea.

For the better part of three centuries, surf writing was a novelty act, far-flung reportage on an exotic pastime, or cabalistic works like Tom Blake’s Hawaiian Surfboard (1935), authoritative, highly specific books dealing with the arcane elements of wave riding and surfboard building. But in 1957, a Hollywood screenwriter, Frederick Kohner, wrote a punchy, fictionalized account of his daughter’s escapades with a crew of regulars at Malibu Point.

The novel, Gidget, introduced surfing to a national audience and brought lingo like “shooting the curl” (racing across the vertical, pitching section of the wave), “pearl-diving” (when the nose of the surfboard goes under water), and “wipeout” into the lexicon. The 1959 movie adaptation, starring Sandra Dee, became a box-office sensation. Surf culture went viral. The flood of newbies into the lineups precipitated not only a surge of beach-themed movies but also reams of pulp surf fiction and how-to-surf books.

Hard-core surfers were not amused. Their literary riposte came in the form of Surfer magazine, a publication intended for real surfers, written by real surfers. Under the stewardship of filmmaker and publisher John Severson, Surfer went to print in 1960 and served as a template for generations of surf magazines to come—mesmerizing surf photographs set alongside essays, interviews, cartoons, tongue-in-cheek advertisements, board riding tips, and photojournalistic travelogues.

By the time Drew Kampion took the reins as Surfer’s editor in 1968, the counterculture had found its voice in its lustrous pages. Free-verse rambles like Kampion’s “The Super Short, Uptight, V-Bottom, Tube Carving Plastic Machine” tuned into the frequency of the shortboard revolution, drawing psychedelic, postmodernist lines in prose. “It is a rare surfer who surfs in the same style that he did last year,” Kampion wrote. An apt credo for writers and riders alike.

In the ‘70s, Kevin Naughton and Craig Peterson, a couple of long-haired Huntington Beach teenagers, drove an old “wiped-out” Volkswagen Bug deep into Central America in search of uncharted, empty waves. Their travel dispatches for Surfer read like Hunter S. Thompson trips, only peppered with tiger sharks, El Salvadorian barroom debauches, and crystalline overhead barrels. Part picaresque, part chivalric romance, part road-trip epic, Naughton and Peterson’s misadventures inspired a new generation of kids to drop out, pack their surfboards, and slide off to parts unknown. If surf literature can be judged on both merit and influence, these Surfer transmissions are about as close as you get to the pinnacle of the motif.

The best, and worst, surf writing has always played out in the magazines. Dig through any old-timer’s rag collection, and you’ll unearth a raft of titles—Surfer, Transworld Surf, Surfing, Waverider, The Surfer’s Journal, Longboard, Tracks, Rad, Aloha, Carve, Surf Girl, Eastern Surf, Southern Soul, White Horses…Some were long-running institutions; others existed for only an issue or two. The surf mag was a niche format, its pool of talent limited to denizens of the intertidal zone (hardly a well-read demographic). Leaf through too many back issues and you begin to feel supersaturated.

How many ways can you depict “a radical hack off the lip” or, as London wrote in Ladies’ Home Journal, “the marching billows, the smoking crests, the white battalions of the infinite army of the sea”? Nevertheless, these glossies—which have gone nearly extinct in the internet era—were a place where surfers could swing their pens freely, where captions read like haikus, interviews like conversations with the Buddha, and where fustian poems were natural extensions of jaw-dropping photos of 20-foot Sunset Beach bombs.

While autobiographies of famous surfers like Kelly Slater and Gerry Lopez make for fascinating reading to the initiated—and outliers like Allan Weisbecker’s drug-addled In Search of Captain Zero (2001) and David Rensin’s biography of Miki Dora, All for a Few Perfect Waves (2009), are wildly entertaining romps through the underbelly of the surfer’s path—precious few works of surf memoir have played to a broader audience. The inside angles are too esoteric. Either you get it or you don’t. You’re in or you’re out.

Sportswriting is, of course, a valid literary mode (see Norman Mailer on boxing, George Plimpton on football, and Bernard Malamud on baseball), but despite the best efforts of the World Surfing League to market surfing as an Olympic-level exhibition, the gladiatorial element of physical contact is lacking, the scoring is too subjective, and contests are profoundly boring affairs that mostly consist in watching athletes’ heads bobbing in the water.

As to surf fiction, the repertory is thinner still. A standout that comes to mind is Kem Nunn’s 1984 surf-noir Tapping the Source, but even I would be hard-pressed to name my top five surf novels.

One unicorn of a surf story, William Finnegan’s “Playing Doc’s Games,” appeared in the New Yorker in 1992. It was a long-form journalistic feature that summoned the wind-whipped peaks of San Francisco and the die-hard commitment of the Ocean Beach surfer. Finnegan wrote in a nuanced, journalistic style that proved palatable to café culture. Here, he evokes the pride of punching through the inside section, where ferocious cold-water waves explode on the shallow sandbar and deny the unfit: “All had passed the snarling mastiff of the inside bar, the price of admission to this green-gold world of glassy low-tide peaks.” Not bad, as surf lit goes. Finnegan’s surf-centric memoir, Barbarian Days, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015, sending out ripples of credibility among the intelligentsia and cementing his position as Grand Vizier of the Dubious Canon.

Perhaps the internet will lay waste to all literary genres, in the end. Just as Finnegan’s opus was making the rounds, the prestige surf magazines were rasping out their last breaths. Surfing shut down in 2017 after more than fifty years in print; Surfer took its last drop in 2020, at the age of sixty. Only stray survivors remain in print today: Carve in the United Kingdom; Surfing Life, Tracks, and Surfing World in Australia; the Surfer’s Journal in the United States.

With unlimited quantities of surf content available at a finger’s touch to anyone with a cell phone, the surf magazines, out of necessity, are doubling down on quality. The Surfer’s Journal fields master wordsmiths like Jamie Brisick and Scott Hulet, and world-class photographers like Grant Ellis and Todd Glaser. The dying gasp of print culture has become a sumptuous, atavistic reduction, and the remnants are regularly producing some of the highest-grade stuff in the history of the medium.

The Web is not completely barren territory, either. Matt Warshaw, a former editor of Surfer, has compiled an online encyclopedia of surf history and vernacular with comprehensive entries ranging from “A-frame” (peak-shaped wave, generally short, hollow, and powerful; ridable in either direction—left or right) to “Zamba, Frieda” (affable but resolute goofyfoot pro surfer from Flagler Beach, Florida; four-time world champion). And blogs and industry-backed websites have helped fill the void created by the death of the surf magazine, providing a forum for surf writers to unleash their howls in real time.

Perhaps it’s fitting in this modern age, when so much of our reading is done in hyperactive bursts, that surf-themed verse would become a more compelling form.

It is typical of surfers, particularly Florida surfers, to reminisce on sessions gone by as if they were unfathomable, irreproducible events. To hear someone speak of the ‘91 Halloween Swell, for example, is to submit to the familiar cadences of Bible verse or mythology. Not surprisingly, the dwindling cadre of surf journalists are experiencing similar pangs of nostalgia for the era of the surf magazine. In recent years, publishing presses have been spooling out collections by grizzled magazine veterans who staked their lives reporting for the tribe. The cream of surf literature can be found in some of these volumes, in the descriptions of waves of consequence or the textures of mysterious offshore barrels and clandestine reefs.

In 2024 alone, Matt George, Steve Pezman, and Ralph Sneeden published collections of surf-themed essays, and Scott Hulet, the longtime editor of The Surfer’s Journal (and one of my favorite scribblers of surf lit), released a hardbound omnibus of his work. Good old Naughton and Peterson, now in their late sixties, are putting out a retrospective of their travels for Surfer as a trio of coffee-table books.

Boiled down to its essence, the sensual elements of surfing will always be rich: the coconut smell of surf wax, a wetsuit drip-drying in the sun, coffee vapor mingling with salt mist, the gleam and crackle of an outside set on a windless morning. One of the best arguments for the legitimacy of the genre is that surfing has its own idiosyncratic language, a patois, and fully inhabits its own universe.

Perhaps it’s fitting in this modern age, when so much of our reading is done in hyperactive bursts, that surf-themed verse would become a more compelling form. To tap into the rhythm of the sea is to connect at a basic, pulsating level with what it means to be human. The trick is laying down the sensation in words, and making it compelling. Hawaiians called it he’e nalu—wave sliding. “One is caught up and hurled shoreward as by some Titan’s hand.” There’s Jack London again. Probably it sounds too trivial, too fatuous, to compare the mentality of a surfer to that of a child chasing after bubbles. After all, what could be more serious, or more sublime, than that euphoric quest? Borne along on that phase change, that transitional fringe between water and wind, surfers react, chemically, to the forces of drag, suction, and outflow—to the liquid energy that guides us all.

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