SNYDER, GARY (SHERMAN)

born May 8, 1930, San Francisco U.S. poet early identified with the Beat movement (q.v.) and, from the late 1960s, an important spokesman for the concerns of communal living and ecological activism. Snyder received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. Educated at Reed College, Portland, Ore., where he received his B.A. in 1951, and at Indiana University, Bloomington, and the University of California, Berkeley, Snyder worked as a forest ranger, logger, and seaman. From 1956 he also studied Zen Buddhism in Japan. Snyder's poetry draws on the mythic and religious experience of his own daily life in his verse. His free verse style exhibits a variety of influences from Walt Whitman to Ezra Pound to Japanese haiku. Prominent in his first two books of poems, Riprap (1959) and Myths and Texts (1960), are images and experiences drawn from his work as a logger and ranger in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. In Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End, Plus One (excerpts from an ongoing cycle of poems, 1965), The Back Country (1967), and Regarding Wave (1969), the fusion of religion into everyday life reflects the author's increasing interest in Eastern philosophies. Later volumes include Turtle Island (1974), for which Snyder won the Pulitzer Prize, and Axe Handles (1983). His alternatives to routinized city life are presented in Earth House Hold (1969), a book of journal fragments and essays, and The Real Work: Interviews and Talks 19641979 (1980). Snyder's later publications include The Old Ways (1977), a selection of essays on aspects of tribal life; He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village, an examination of Haida Indian myth, published in 1979 but written as an academic paper more than 25 years earlier; and Passage through India (1984), an account of an Asian pilgrimage. Among the other awards Snyder received was the 1966 Poetry Prize from the National Institute of Arts and Letters.