Richard Serra, the most famous and influential sculptor alive, once said that he attended the University of California at Santa Barbara to study literature and learn to surf. The Pacific waves, and his upbringing in San Francisco (where he was born in 1939), left a lasting impression on Serra's work. His Spanish immigrant father worked in shipyards, and monumental sculptures like Sequence, a centerpiece of the Serra exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, were made by a Maryland firm specializing in battleships. At Santa Barbara, where he studied with brilliant critic Hugh Kenner, Serra developed a lifelong love of Emerson and the seafaring Melville (whom he calls "the anchor" of his education). When Kenner gently suggested that he might have more of a future in art than literature, Serra sent some of his drawings to Yale, where he joined an amazing group of students, including Chuck Close, Brice Marden, and Nancy Graves (to whom he was briefly married), who were looking for something new to do after the waning grandiosity of Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art. The show at MoMA, which includes a generous selection of earlier work, allows visitors to retrace Serra's amazing voyage.