Gary Snyder Letters to Shandel Parks, 1953-1966 (MSS 719)

Born May 8, 1930, in San Francisco, Gary Snyder spent most of his youth in Washington State and Oregon, where he received his BA in anthropology at Reed College, Portland, in 1951. He studied Oriental languages at U.C. Berkeley from 1953 to 1956; while at Berkeley, Shandel Parks introduced him to poets Kenneth Rexroth, Shunryon Suzuki and Philip Whalen, among others. During this time he also associated with Beat writers including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Snyder left Berkeley in 1956 for Japan where he studied Zen Bhuddism. For the next twelve years Snyder alternated between California and Japan before settling back in California in 1968.

Snyder's first book of poems, Riprap, was published in 1959. Since then he has published 17 other works of poetry and prose and won numerous literary prizes including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship (1969-70), a Bollingen Foundation Fellowship (1966-1969), the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island (1974) and the Bollingen Prize for Poetry for Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996).