Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder (born May 8, 1930) is an American poet (often associated with the Beat Generation); and an essayist, lecturer, and environmental activist who is frequently described as the 'laureate of Deep Ecology — roles reflecting his studies of both Buddhist spirituality and nature. As a social critic, Snyder's views share something in common with Lewis Mumford, Aldous Huxley, Karl Hess, Aldo Leopold, and Karl Polanyi.

Early life

Gary Sherman Snyder was born in San Francisco, California to Harold and Lois Snyder. His family, impoverished by the Great Depression, moved to Washington when he was two, where they tended a small dairy and made cedar-wood shingles, then moved to Portland, Oregon ten years later. During the ten childhood years in Washington, Snyder became aware of the presence of Coast Salish people and developed an interest in American Native peoples in general and their traditional relationship with nature.

Related Topics:
San Francisco, California - Great Depression - Washington - Portland, Oregon

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Snyder's parents separated and, in adolescence, Gary and his sister were raised by Lois, who worked during this period as a newspaper journalist. One of Gary's boyhood jobs was as a newspaper copy boy. Also during his teen years, he worked as a camp counsellor, and went mountain climbing with the Mazamas youth group.

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In 1947, he started attending Reed College as a scholarship student. Here he met, and for a time roomed with, Philip Whalen and Lew Welch. At Reed, Snyder published his first poems in a student journal. He also spent a summer working as a seaman (an experience he was to repeat in the mid 1950s); as much as a way to earn money and experience other cultures, in port cities, this work served to put him in more touch with the oceans or aspects of the hydrosphere. In 1951, he graduated with a BA in Anthropology and literature and spent the summer working as a timber scaler in the Warm Springs Indian Reservation, experiences which formed the basis for some of his earliest published poems (including "A Berry Feast"), later collected in the book The Back Country. Snyder worked the next year as a fire lookout for a national-park area. He also encountered the basic ideas of Buddhism and, through its arts, some of the Far East's traditional attitudes toward nature. Going on to Indiana University to study anthropology (where Snyder also practiced self-taught Zen meditation), he left after a single semester to return to San Francisco and to 'sink or swim as a poet'.

Related Topics:
1947 - Reed College - Philip Whalen - Lew Welch - Hydrosphere - 1951 - BA - Anthropology - Buddhism - Far East - Indiana University

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