Peanuts: An Oral Biography

Exploring Legend, Myth and Archetype in California Surfing's Subculture: George Peanuts Larson was first a legend, then a myth, and finally a surfing archetype. His importance to today's surfing culture is best described as seminal. Simultaneously oral biography and near history, the book spans the years that stretch from 1930 to 1960. Larson called this period : ...the way it's never gonna be again. Coming of age during the Great Depression, Larson created what would become identifiable as a distinctly surfer persona long before there was a media to extol or exploit it. Author Craig Lockwood creates a sense of Larson's provincial California before and after WW II centering on an individual who was greater than the sum of his parts.