Gary Snyder was born on May 8th, 1930 in San Francisco, California. He attended Reed College with his friends Lew Welsh and Philip Whalen. He held many different jobs during his lifetime, including: logger, seaman, and fire lookout for the United States Forest Service. In 1951, he graduated with a degree in Literature and Anthropology. He took a semester of Linguistics Studies at Indiana University, then transferred to the University of California at Berkeley to study Oriental Languages. He became actively involved in the growing West Coast poetry renaissance. In the Summer of 1955, he worked on trail crew in Yosemite National Park, where he began to write his first poems that he felt were truly his. He debuted his poem "A Berry Feast" at the Six Gallery Poetry Reading in October of the same year in San Francisco. A year later, he left the United States fora 12-year trip abroad, spending most of the time in Japan. Six months out of his trip he spend in India with Allen Ginsberg. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for "Turtle Island." In 1969, he returned to the United States to build a house in the foothills of the Northern Sierra Nevada Mountains (where he still lives today). Since 1985, he has taught at the University of California-Davis, where he helped develop a new academic discipline based on the studies of nature and culture.
Diane DiPrima Carolyn Cassady Gregory Corso Kenneth Rexroth Lucien Carr Michael McClure
John Clellon Holmes Philip Lamantia Bob Kaufman Jan Kerouac LeRoi Jones Bob Dylan
Charles Bukowski Anne Waldman Joanne Kyger Herbert Huncke
Peter Orlovsky Philip Whalen
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