Gary Sherman Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet, essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist. His early poetry is linked to the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance, and he is known as the "poet laureate of Deep Ecology." Snyder has won a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and the American Book Award. His work, in all his roles, shows a deep interest in Buddhist spirituality and nature. He has translated works from ancient Chinese and modern Japanese into English. For many years, Snyder worked as a teacher at the University of California, Davis, and later served on the California Arts Council.

Life and career

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. He came from German, Scottish, Irish, and English backgrounds. His family had little money because of the Great Depression and moved to King County, Washington, when he was two years old. There, they raised dairy cows, kept laying hens, had a small orchard, and made cedar-wood shingles. At age seven, Snyder was sick in bed for four months after an accident. "So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library," he said in an interview, "and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious—I figure that accident changed my life. At the end of four months, I had read more than most kids do by the time they're 18. And I didn't stop." During his ten years in Washington, Snyder learned about the Coast Salish people and became interested in Native American cultures and their connection to nature.

In 1942, after his parents divorced, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon, with his mother and younger sister, Anthea. His mother, Lois Snyder Hennessy (born Wilkey), worked as a reporter for The Oregonian. One of his early jobs was as a newspaper copy-boy at The Oregonian. During his teen years, he attended Lincoln High School, worked as a camp counselor, and climbed mountains with the Mazamas youth group. Climbing stayed important to him, especially in his twenties and thirties. In 1947, he studied at Reed College with a scholarship. There, he met writer Carl Proujan and became friends with poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. While at Reed, he published his first poems in a student journal. In 1948, he worked as a seaman. To get this job, he joined a union that no longer exists and later worked as a seaman in the mid-1950s to learn about other cultures. Snyder married Alison Gass in 1950; they separated after seven months and divorced in 1952.

While at Reed, Snyder studied folklore on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon. He graduated in 1951 with degrees in anthropology and literature. His senior thesis, The Dimensions of a Myth, used ideas from anthropology, folklore, psychology, and literature to study a myth from the Pacific Northwest’s Haida people. He worked as a timber scaler at Warm Springs during summers, building relationships with the people there. This experience inspired some of his earliest poems, including "A Berry Feast," later collected in The Back Country. He also learned about Buddhism and East Asian ideas about nature. He went to Indiana University with a graduate fellowship to study anthropology. (Snyder also practiced Zen meditation on his own.) He left after one semester to return to San Francisco and try to become a poet. Snyder worked as a fire lookout in the North Cascades in Washington during summers in 1952 and 1953. His attempt to get another lookout job in 1954 failed because he was associated with the Marine Cooks and Stewards union. Instead, he worked in logging at Warm Springs, which helped shape his book Myths and Texts and the essay Ancient Forests of the Far West.

Back in San Francisco, Snyder lived with Whalen, who shared his interest in Zen. Reading the writings of D. T. Suzuki had influenced Snyder’s decision not to continue studying anthropology. In 1953, he enrolled at the University of California, Berkeley, to study Asian culture and languages. He studied ink and wash painting with Chiura Obata and Tang dynasty poetry with Ch'en Shih-hsiang. Snyder spent summers working in forests, including one summer as a trail-builder in Yosemite. In 1955 and 1956, he lived in a cabin outside Mill Valley, California, with Jack Kerouac, which he called "Marin-an." He also studied at the American Academy of Asian Studies, where teachers like Saburo Hasegawa and Alan Watts taught. Hasegawa showed Snyder how landscape painting could be a meditative practice, inspiring Snyder to write poetry in a similar way. This led to his book Mountains and Rivers Without End, published 40 years later. During these years, Snyder wrote and collected his own work and translated poems by the 8th-century Chinese poet Han Shan, which appeared in a chapbook in 1959 titled Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems.

Snyder met Allen Ginsberg when Ginsberg asked Kenneth Rexroth for help finding him. Through Ginsberg, Snyder and Kerouac became friends. This time influenced Kerouac’s novel The Dharma Bums, and Snyder inspired the novel’s main character, Japhy Ryder, just as Neal Cassady inspired Dean Moriarty in On the Road. Many Beat writers had city backgrounds, so Snyder, with his experience in the countryside and manual labor, seemed fresh and unusual to them. Lawrence Ferlinghetti later called Snyder "the Thoreau of the Beat Generation."

Snyder read his poem "A Berry Feast" at a poetry event in San Francisco on October 7, 1955, where Ginsberg first read his poem "Howl." This event marked the rise of the Beat movement in the public eye. It was also when Snyder first became involved with the Beats, though he was not part of the original New York group. He joined through friends like Whalen and Welch. As described in Kerouac’s Dharma Bums, Snyder believed he could help bring together Western and Eastern cultures. His first book, Riprap, which included poems about his work as a forest lookout and trail builder, was published in 1959.

Some Beats, like Whalen, were interested in Zen, but Snyder was one of the most serious students of the subject. He prepared for study in Japan in every way he could. In 1955, the First Zen Institute of America offered him a scholarship for a year of Zen training in Japan, but the State Department refused to give him a passport, saying "it has been alleged you are a Communist." A court ruling later changed this, and Snyder got his passport. His expenses were paid by Ruth Fuller Sasaki, who he was supposed to work for. Initially, he served as a personal attendant and English tutor to Zen abbot Miura Isshu at Rinko-in, a temple in Kyoto. After morning meditation, chanting, and chores, he took Japanese classes, improving his spoken Japanese enough to study kōans.

Work

Gary Snyder's poetry often uses everyday speech patterns, but his style is known for being flexible and taking many different forms. He usually does not use traditional rhythmic patterns or planned rhymes. According to Glyn Maxwell, Snyder's poems are inspired by a deep respect for Native American tribes, the Earth, and a desire to connect with nature rather than modern life. His work also includes themes of shared experiences and reflection.

Stewart Brand, an author and editor, once said that Snyder's poetry connects people to the planet in a simple yet meaningful way. Jody Norton explained that this simplicity and depth come from Snyder's use of natural images, such as mountains, plants, and animals. In his 1968 poem "Beneath My Hand and Eye the Distant Hills, Your Body," Snyder compares the closeness of a romantic touch to the distant landscapes of the Uintah Mountains. This helps readers feel both personal and connected to the world around them. Snyder described his goal as helping people move beyond their own bodies to share experiences with others.

Snyder's ideas were influenced by Native American traditions and Buddhist practices, such as Yamabushi initiation. He also admired writers like D. H. Lawrence, William Butler Yeats, and ancient Chinese poets. William Carlos Williams influenced his early work, and Robinson Jeffers, a poet who wrote about the American West, inspired him. However, while Jeffers focused on nature over people, Snyder believed humans are part of nature. Snyder has explored topics like biology, mysticism, and systems theory in his writing. He argues that people must consider long-term effects of their actions and find ways to balance nature and human culture.

In 2004, Snyder received the Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards Grand Prize. He credited influences such as traditional songs, Native American poetry, William Blake, Walt Whitman, Jeffers, Ezra Pound, Noh drama, Zen sayings, Federico García Lorca, and Robert Duncan. He emphasized that haiku and Chinese poetry had the greatest impact on his work.

Snyder challenges the idea that Native American cultures are simple or violent. In the 1960s, he developed a "neo-tribalist" view, similar to the ideas of French sociologist Michel Maffesoli. Unlike some thinkers who feared a return to tribal life, Snyder believes in a positive future that blends tradition, nature, and politics. He argues that humans and nature are not enemies but connected. His work aims to inspire change by addressing environmental issues emotionally, physically, and politically.

Snyder is often linked to the Beat Generation, a group of writers known for their unconventional ideas. He read poetry at the famous Six Gallery event and was mentioned in Jack Kerouac's novel The Dharma Bums. Some critics say his connection to the Beats is overstated and that he belongs to the San Francisco Renaissance, a separate literary movement. Snyder does not strongly oppose being called a Beat but prefers to describe the group as "we" and "us."

In a 1974 interview, Snyder said, "The term Beat is better used for a smaller group of writers… the immediate group around Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, plus Gregory Corso and a few others. Many of us… belong together in the category of the San Francisco Renaissance. Still, beat can also be defined as a particular state of mind… and I was in that mind for a while."

General sources

• Charters, Ann (editor). The Portable Beat Reader. Penguin Books, New York, 1992. ISBN 0-670-83885-3 (hardcover); ISBN 0-14-015102-8 (paperback)
• Hunt, Anthony. "Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End." University of Nevada Press, 2004. ISBN 0-87417-545-3
• Knight, Arthur Winfield (editor). The Beat Vision (1987). Paragon House. ISBN 0-913729-40-X; ISBN 0-913729-41-8 (paperback)
• Kyger, Joanne. Strange Big Moon: The Japan and India Journals: 1960–1964 (2000). North Atlantic Books. ISBN 978-1-55643-337-5
• Smith, Eric Todd. Reading Gary Snyder's Mountains and Rivers Without End (1999). Boise State University. ISBN 978-0-88430-141-7
• Snyder, Gary. The Politics of Ethnopoetics (1975). Snyder essay "A Place in Space"
• Snyder, Gary. The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964–1979 (1980). New Directions, New York. ISBN 0-8112-0761-7 (hardcover); ISBN 0-8112-0760-9 (paperback)
• Stirling, Isabel. Zen Pioneer: The Life & Works of Ruth Fuller Sasaki (2006). Shoemaker & Hoard. ISBN 978-1-59376-110-3
• Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks (2002). Counterpoint. ISBN 1-58243-148-5; ISBN 1-58243-294-5 (paperback)
• Western Literature Association. Updating the Literary West (1997). Texas Christian University Press. ISBN 978-0-87565-175-0