Mr. Griffin:

I posted the inquiry below on the Twain Forum some time ago, but received just a single response.
 
Is there, by chance, any reference in any of the new Twain materials to his surfing experience in Hawaii?
 
I am attempting to document any Twain reference/comment to surfing ("surf-bathing") other than his comments in his novel Roughing It. (Twain attempted surfing while in Hawaii, failed miserably, and described the experience years later in Roughing It.)

My extensive review of the literature (including the Twain Project website) revealed that Twain rarely, if ever, mentioned his surfing attempt in his lectures. Given the novelty of "surf-bathing" or "wave-sliding" at the time, it seems odd that Twain routinely omitted the experience from his lectures.

Questions:
1. Does anyone have a Twain lecture review that specifically mentions
surfing ("surf-bathing" or "wave-sliding")?
2. Does anyone have any ideas or would like to speculate why Twain
prominently mentions his surfing attempt in the novel Roughing It, but
failed to routinely include it his Sandwich Island or Roughing It lectures?

I look forward to hearing from you,
David Matuszak


On May 4, 2015, at 11:14 AM, Benjamin GRIFFIN wrote:

> There are going to be more stories in the press about this. It's great that
> there's interest in our next volume, but because some of the stories are
> pretty garbled, I want to clarify that no discrete "cache" or "trove" of
> anything has been recently found.
> 
> Rick Bucci, a former editor at the MT Project who now lives and works in
> New York, has prepared a critical, annotated edition of Mark Twain's
> newspaper correspondence from San Francisco to the Virginia City
> Territorial Enterprise. Rick's painstaking work of many years is now being
> copy-edited and re-checked here in Berkeley.
> 
> The discovery of new articles by Mark Twain is, as Forum readers will
> realize, a constant process, not a single find. Of the things that are
> "new" in this volume, some have been found by Rick, some by other
> researchers, over a period of many years.
> 
> -- 
> Benjamin Griffin
> Associate Editor, Mark Twain Project
> The Bancroft Library
> University of California, Berkeley 94720-6000
> (510) 664-4238