A little-remembered phase of Mark Twain’s life is his four months on assignment for the Sacramento Union newspaper in the Sandwich Islands, dispatches from which were later collected in “Mark Twain’s Letters from Hawaii”.

I like the idea of America’s greatest writer looking for the perfect wave:

You heard right, Huck: America’s greatest writer took a wooden surfboard and paddled out to wait, as he had seen naked locals do, “for a particularly prodigious billow to come along,” upon which billow he prodigiously wiped out.

“None but natives ever master the art of surf-bathing thoroughly,” he wrote.

Is it good or bad that he never incorporated the experience into “Huckleberry Finn”? Picture Huck and Jim surfing down the Mississippi…