Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life
by William Finnegan
Summary
This is William Finnegan's own account of a life organized almost entirely around waves, beginning with a childhood split between Los Angeles and Hawaii where he started surfing as a boy and never really stopped. Finnegan tells of leaving UC Santa Cruz with a literature degree in 1974 and setting out on a years long surfing pilgrimage across the Pacific and on through Asia, Australia and Africa, chasing remote breaks with the single minded devotion of someone who had organized an entire adulthood around a sport most people leave behind with adolescence.
The memoir follows Finnegan into the career that eventually anchored him, teaching in South Africa during apartheid, an experience that became his first book, Crossing the Line, and then decades as a New Yorker staff writer covering conflict and politics around the world, work that ran in parallel with a surfing life he never actually gave up. He writes about aging into the sport, about the friendships and rivalries built entirely around finding and riding waves other people never see, and about a 1992 New Yorker series on San Francisco surf culture, Playing Doc's Games, still cited as some of the finest surf writing ever published.
Finnegan writes with a journalist's precision about something intensely personal, translating the physical experience of a wave, the fear, the timing, the specific quality of a specific break, into prose exact enough that readers who have never surfed still feel it. It suits a reader who wants obsession itself explained from the inside, patiently and without apology, by someone who spent an entire career elsewhere and never stopped organizing his real life around the ocean.
Historical Context & Significance
Barbarian Days won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Finnegan, published in 2015 after decades in which surfing ran as a kind of private life alongside his public career reporting on apartheid era South Africa, Mexican politics and American poverty for the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1987.
The critic Andy Martin, writing in the Literary Review, wrote that reading the memoir is like looking through a dreamy, luminous telescope that magnifies birth and death, and it has become one of the most widely read books ever written about surfing specifically because it treats the sport as a genuine subject for literature rather than a backdrop for adventure writing. It remains the book most commonly recommended to readers who want to understand why people organize entire lives around chasing waves, written by someone who did exactly that while also building one of the most respected careers in American journalism. That year's finalists were Elizabeth Alexander's memoir The Light of the World and T. J. Stiles's Custer's Trials.