Ecology Hall of Fame
Gary Snyder
Born 1930 Ecology Hall of Fame One of the major literary figures of the 20th century. His is the ethical voice in the time honored traditions of the American writer Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) and the Japanese Dogen (1200 - 1253), the founder of the Soto school of Zen Buddhism. American poet, Zen Buddhist, deep ecology philosopher, and environmentalist, Gary Snyder was born on May 8, 1930, In San Francisco, Cal. and grew up near Puget Sound in Washington state. As a young boy he developed a love for nature that has lasted all of his life. He also developed a love for mountain climbing and by age fifteen he had climbed Mount St. Helens. By age seventeen he had climbed most of the major peaks in the northwest United States. Snyder attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, with his friends, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, both future Beat poets. He graduated from Reed College with a degree in Literature and Anthropology. He did his post graduate work in Linguistics at Indiana University and at the University of California-Davis, where he studied Asian languages. He had a strong interest in Chinese and Japanese culture and poetry. This interest was shared by poet Kenneth Rexroth (1905 - 1982), who introduced Snyder to the Beat poetry crowd. It was Snyder who inspired the Zen Buddhist craze that swept through the Beat movement. Snyder has worked as a forest ranger, merchant seaman , mountain spotter, and a longshoreman on the San Francisco docks. He also organized mountain climbing expeditions with some of the Beat writers, and one in particular, with writer Jack Kerouac (1922 - 1969), climbing Matterhorn Peak in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, inspired Kerouac to use Snyder as the semi-mystical poet in his book "Dharma Bums" (1958). | |
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