Gary Snyder
Gary Snyder, born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco, California, is a celebrated American poet known for his deep connection to nature and Eastern philosophies, particularly Zen Buddhism. Growing up on a farm in Washington state, Snyder's early experiences shaped his appreciation for the environment, which later became a central theme in his poetry. He gained prominence in the literary world during his time at Reed College and later at the University of California, Berkeley, where he interacted with key figures of the Beat Generation, including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.
Snyder's life included a significant period in a Japanese Zen monastery, which profoundly influenced his writing and worldview. He is recognized for his Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, *Turtle Island*, among many other works, totaling twenty-five books of poetry and essays. His literary contributions have earned him accolades, such as a Guggenheim Fellowship and recognition from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. In addition to his writing career, Snyder has taught at various institutions, notably the University of California at Davis. His work is often compared to that of environmentalist Henry David Thoreau, reflecting his commitment to nature and the insights he draws from diverse cultural influences, including Native American traditions.
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Subject Terms
Gary Snyder
- Born: May 8, 1930
- Birthplace: San Francisco, California
Author Profile
Gary Snyder was born in 1930 to Lois Snyder Hennessy, a creative writing student from the University of Washington, and Harold Snyder, an unemployed automobile salesman. From age two to twelve, he lived on his parents’ two-acre farm north of Seattle. At ten, he began delivering milk to neighbors, his hands blue with cold during the winters. Shortly after the attack on Pearl Harbor, his father accepted a position in Portland, Oregon, with the U.S. Civil Service Commission.
Snyder saved for his first sleeping bag by selling subscriptions for a Portland newspaper. His clothes came from donations to the Goodwill charity. After high school, he worked at KEX radio as a music librarian’s office boy and later as a copy boy for United Press. Despite his poverty, he was admitted to Reed College, Oregon’s best private school. Here, he developed sympathies for anarchist ideas and radical politics while working for a bachelor’s degree in literature and anthropology. At Reed, he became part of a bohemian group that included poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, who followed him to San Francisco in the early 1950s. Snyder earned his meals by washing dishes and his clothes by working as a copyboy. His professors at Reed praised his poetry, and visiting poet William Carlos Williams also singled out his work.
After graduating from Reed at age nineteen in 1951, Snyder became a seaman, a logger, and a Forest Service worker. He also did graduate study in linguistics at Indiana University before entering the University of California at Berkeley. There, he studied and taught Japanese, Chinese, and Sanskrit. At Berkeley he met Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and other members of the "Beat Generation. " Kerouac later memorialized Snyder as Japhy Ryder in his novel The Dharma Bums (1958). Kerouac’s portrayal of Snyder’s values and lifestyle became the model for hippie culture in the 1960s.
Sponsored by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, the American wife of a Zen scholar, Snyder embarked on an influential thirteen-year stay in a monastery in Japan. He sought to discover whether he was disciplined enough to qualify as a Zen scholar. He emptied the temple latrines into buckets and carried them on poles across his shoulders to the fields and gardens. Coming to realize he was “too silly” to be a monk, he moved out of the monastery and continued his Zen study while he continued to write poetry. His work began to attract attention, and he was named a Bollingen Fellow. After his marriage to Masa Uehara, the daughter of a teacher he met in college, he won a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1967.
In 1968, he returned from Japan to an America racked with race problems. Berkeley hired him to teach poetry for a year, the same year he bought his first suit. His poetry won an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters. He developed a passion for the natural environment, particularly around Lake Tahoe and Grass Valley. He moved there with his family and built his own Japanese-style house with the help of college students, professors, and friends. Writing about his sons Kai and Gen and the natural world, he won a Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1975 for his collection Turtle Island. In 1986, he published Left Out in the Rain: New Poems, 1947–1986.
Although many professorships had been offered to Snyder, he turned down most of them, although he taught at the University of California at Davis from 1986 to 2001. He and Uehara divorced in 1989. In 1991, Snyder married Carole Lynn Koda who later died in 2006. He has published twenty-five books of poetry and essays, including the epic poem Mountains and Rivers without End (1996). Synder drew a modest income from his writing, supplementing it with talks, poetry readings on campuses, and teaching. In 2022, the Library of America released a 1,000-page volume of Snyder’s works entitled Gary Snyder: Collected Poems.
In a 2020 essay summarizing Snyder’s work, particularly his appreciation of the natural world, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Haas placed Snyder in the same category as notable American environmental author Henry David Thoreau. In addition to his Zen background and time studying Eastern cultures, Haas described Snyder as influenced by Native American communities.
Bibliography
Dean, Tim. Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious. St. Martin’s Press, 1991.
Goodyear, Dana. "Zen Master." New Yorker. Condé Nast, 20 Oct. 2008. www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/10/20/zen-master. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
Gray, Timothy. Gary Snyder and the Pacific Rim. U of Iowa P, 2006.
Griffin, Shaun T. "Living under the Stars." National Endowment for the Humanities, 24 Mar. 2023, www.neh.gov/article/living-under-stars-homage-gary-snyder. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
Haas, Robert. "The Nature of Gary Snyder." The Paris Review, 10 Sept. 2020, www.theparisreview.org/blog/2020/09/10/the-nature-of-gary-snyder. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
Halper, Jon, editor. Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. Sierra Club Books, 1991.
Johnson, Hillary Louise. “Man versus Nature.” Sactown Magazine, 23 Feb. 2023, www.sactownmag.com/man-verses-nature-gary-snyder/. Accessed 6 Oct. 2024.
Molesworth, Charles. Gary Snyder’s Vision: Poetry and the Real Work. U of Missouri P, 1983.
Murphy, Patrick, editor. Critical Essays on Gary Snyder. G. K. Hall, 1990.
---. A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder. Oregon State UP, 2000.
---. Understanding Gary Snyder. U of South Carolina P, 1992.
Phillips, Rod. “Forest Beatniks” and “Urban Thoreaus”: Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, Lew Welch, and Michael McClure. P. Lang, 2000.
Schuler, Robert Jordan. Journeys toward the Original Mind: The Long Poems of Gary Snyder. P. Lang, 1994.
Sciagaj, Leonard M. Sustainable Poetry: Four American Ecopoets. UP of Kentucky, 1999.
Smith, Eric Todd. Reading Gary Snyder’s “Mountains and Rivers Without End.” Boise State UP, 2000.
Snyder, Gary. The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 1964-1979, edited by William Scott McLean, New Directions, 1980.