Gary Snyder

"Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930, and grew up partly in Portland, Oregon, and partly in the coastal Washington (state) countryside. He graduated from Reed College (Portland) in literature and anthropology. He was fascinated with American Aboriginals (Indians). He experimented with peyote in the early 1950s.

"After pursuing some graduate studies in Indiana, he moved west again to the Bay Area. In Berkeley, he pursued Zen Buddhist meditation and studied Chinese linguistics. Sometimes working as a merchant seaman, he travelled the Pacific and parts of the Atlantic and other seas.

"Since youth, Snyder was a poet. He was one of a handful of West Coast poets who participated in the now-famous 'Gallery Six poetry reading' (North Beach, San Francisco, 1955). This, perhaps, touched off the North American poetry renaissance which continues even today.

"Snyder was a pioneer of modern voluntary simplicity in his life in the Bay Area. (This phase was celebrated in Jack Kerouac's book The Dharma Bums .) The lifestyle was good prep for the Zen studies Snyder pursued in Japan, off and on, over 12 years time. He was also initiated into a Japanese backcountry form of animism.

"Snyder's first book (poetry) was published in 1959. In Japan, he published essays on the post-war literature and bohmemianism of America.

"Snyder went to India (for a number of months) around 1963. Back in Japan, he shared LSD with American friends and Japanese Zen monks, and found it an interesting supplement to Zen practice. His open, careful, earnest eclecticism is probably the characteristic that made Gary Snyder one of the most influential West Coast counterculture figures.

"On his return stays in the U.S., Snyder was becoming a spokesperson for ecology, neo-paganism, community anarchy (non-hierarchy), and world-culture possibilities. Interviews with him were published increasingly from the mid '60s -- and they continue to appear today.

"Snyder (along with Leary, Ginsberg, Shunryu Suzuki, and numerous electric bands) was a focal point of the famed Human Be-In (Golden Gate Park, San Francisco, 1966). Also, his poetry and rich conversation appeared in the San Francisco Oracle and other counterculture publications (eventually to include the Whole Earth Catalogs, and Co-Evolution Quarterly).

"After Snyder moved back to the U.S. permanently (late '60s), he bought land in the Sierra foothills of eastern California, and built a homestead. 'Go lightly. Learn the plants,' was one of his mottos. While continuing to publish poetry with a farily wide audience, several books of Snyder's essays and talks were also published: The Old Ways ; The Real Work ; The Practice of the Wild ; and, most recently, A Place in Space .

"Snyder has published many volumes of poems, and has read poetry and given talks across the U.S., and in Europe and Asia." --J.Russ (in a personal e-mail, Saturday, 12 April 1997).

• The Beat Generation by Bruce Cook
  (1971, non-fiction)

• The Beats edited by Seymour Krim
  (1960, anthology... contains: "Letter from Kyoto" by Gary Snyder)

• The Beat Generation Writers edited by A.Robert Lee
  (1996)

• The Beat Scene edited by Elias Wilentz
  (1960, anthology... Corinth Books, New York, US)

• Notes From the New Underground edited by Jesse Kornbluth
  (1968... contains: "Changes" by Allen Ginsberg, Timothy Leary, Gary Snyder, Alan Watts)

City Lights Bookshop
(Literary home of the Beat Generation)

Literary Kicks -- Gary Snyder Biography
(Levi Asher's biography of Gary Snyder with a link to bibliography)
"this site has really and truly developed, it's probably the best overview on the beat scene available on the internet... the personal interest of one begat the joint effort of others... do check it out...it's absolutely wonderful and most highly recommended." --Henry W.Targowski.