Gary Snyder Papers, 1910-2018, bulk 1945-2009

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Summary

Creators:
Snyder, Gary (1930-)
Abstract:
The Gary Snyder Papers document the personal and professional activities of Gary Snyder (1930- ), poet, essayist, translator, Zen Buddhist, environmentalist, lecturer, and teacher. Snyder is considered one of the most significant environmental writers of the twentieth century and a central figure in environmental activism. He wrote more than twenty books of poetry and prose including his forty-year work Mountains and Rivers Without End and Turtle Island, for which he won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The collection spans the years 1910-2009 (1945-2002 bulk) and continues to grow. Drafts as well as final versions of poems and prose pieces are found in the collection along with correspondence, recordings of poetry readings and interviews, subject files, manuscripts and publications by other authors, serials, ephemera, and memorabilia.
Extent:
275.2 linear feet
Language:
English
Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Gary Snyder Papers, D-050, Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.

Background

Scope and content:

The Gary Snyder Papers illustrate the personal and professional activities of Gary Snyder's life. The collection spans the years 1910-2009, with the bulk of the material dating from 1945-2002. Drafts as well as final versions of poems and prose pieces are found in the collection along with correspondence, recordings of poetry readings and interviews, subject files, manuscripts and publications by other authors, serials, ephemera, and memorabilia.

The holdings of Snyder's works--poetry and prose drafts, research and lecture notes, translations, interviews, proofs, broadsides, and books--and Snyder's correspondence are especially rich. Among his correspondents are: Donald Allen, Peter Berg, Cid Corman, Peter Coyote, Robert Creeley, Bill Devall, Clayton Eshleman, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Joanne Kyger, James Laughlin, Michael McClure, Kenneth Rexroth, George Sessions, Anne Waldman, Alan Watts, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen.

The Gary Snyder Papers are divided into eleven series: 1. Works by Gary Snyder, 2. Correspondence, 3. About Gary Snyder and His Works, 4. Readings, Talks, and Workshops, 5. Files, 6. Others' Works, 7. Serials, 8. Audiovisual Materials, 9. Photographs, 10. Ephemera, and 11. Memorabilia.

Biographical / historical:

Poet, essayist, translator, Zen Buddhist, environmentalist, and teacher, Gary Snyder made an indelible mark on late-twentieth century thought. He is considered one of the most significant environmental writers of the twentieth century and a central figure in environmental activism.

Snyder wrote more than twenty books of poetry and prose including: Riprap (1959), Myths & Texts (1960), Riprap & Cold Mountain Poems (1965), A Range of Poems (1966), The Back Country (1967), Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries for Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1969), Regarding Wave (1970), Turtle Island (1974), The Old Ways (1977), The Real Work: Interviews & Talks, 1964-1979 (1980), Axe Handles (1983), Passage Through India (1983), Left Out in the Rain: New Poems 1947-1985 (1986), The Practice of the Wild (1990), No Nature: New and Selected Poems (1992), A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds, New and Selected Prose (1995), Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996), The Gary Snyder Reader (1999), The High Sierra of California (2002), and Look Out: A Selection of Writings (2002).

In addition to his books, Snyder contributed his works of poetry and prose to numerous journals and anthologies. He often provided introductions and prefaces to scholarly translations, Buddhist studies, and poetry books. His writings have been translated into a number of languages, and he has been the subject of several critical books and many interviews.

Gary Sherman Snyder was born to Harold and Lois Snyder on May 8, 1930 in San Francisco, California. The family soon moved to the Pacific Northwest, to start a small dairy farm north of Seattle, Washington. His sister, Anthea, was born in 1932. The family moved to Portland, Oregon, in 1942. Snyder climbed Mt. St. Helens in 1945; and a year later he joined the Portland Mazamas, a mountaineering club. Throughout his life he has continued to climb mountains and take long wilderness hikes. During his high school years, he held a number of part-time jobs including working at a camp on Spirit Lake in Washington and as a copy boy for the Portland Oregonian.

In 1947, Snyder graduated from Lincoln High School and enrolled at Reed College. He published his first poems in the campus literary magazine, Janus. While at Reed, he met fellow poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch who would become his lifelong friends. Snyder graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature and Anthropology in 1951. His senior thesis was later published as the book, He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979).

Snyder spent the summer of 1951 working as a timber scaler on the Warm Springs Indian Reservation on the east side of the Oregon Cascades. Following the summer job, he hitchhiked to Indiana University to begin graduate study in Anthropology. It was on the trip east to Indiana that Snyder had a revelation that constituted a real turning point in his life. In an interview with the Commonwealth Club on May 15, 2002, Snyder described the incident, "In the middle of Nevada, on old Interstate 40, there was a period of about five hours where nobody would give me a ride. As I stood there in the middle of the sagebrush flats, I was reading through a chapter of Suzuki's Essays in Zen Buddhism, First Series, and I hit on some phrases that turned my mind totally around. I knew that I wouldn't last at Indiana, and that I would soon be heading in the other direction back toward Asia, but I had to complete my short-term karma. So I did finish out that semester and then went back to the West Coast."

By spring 1952, Snyder was living with Philip Whalen in San Francisco and taking on odd jobs in order to support himself. During the early 1950's, Snyder returned several times to the forests and mountains of the Pacific Northwest for summer employment including stints as a choker-setter for the Warm Springs Lumber Company and as a fire lookout. From 1953 to 1955, he lived in a tiny cottage near campus as he pursued graduate studies in the Department of East Asian Languages at the University of California, Berkeley. It was while he was at Berkeley that Snyder met Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac.

In October 1955, Snyder and Ginsberg hosted a poetry reading at the Six Gallery in San Francisco. Snyder, Ginsberg, Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen read, and Kenneth Rexroth acted as master of ceremonies. Snyder read his poem, "A Berry Feast." Jack Kerouac recalled this event in The Dharma Bums (1958) and used Snyder as the basis for the book's fictional hero, Japhy Ryder, a Beat poet, Asian scholar, and mountain climber. In the early months of 1956, Snyder moved into a cabin in Mill Valley and Kerouac later joined him there. Snyder named the place, Marin-an -- Japanese for "Horse Grove Hermitage" for the adjacent meadow with its grazing mares.

In May 1956, Snyder left for Japan to study and work at a Buddhist temple, Shokoku-ji, in conjunction with the activities of the First Zen Institute of America's Kyoto facility. He took a job, in August 1957, as a wiper in the engine room of the S.S. Sappa Creek and was at sea for eight months until the ship reached the United States in April 1958. He spent the next nine months involved in the San Francisco Bay Area literary scene before returning, in early 1959, to Kyoto, where he began studying under Oda Sesso Roshi at the Daitoku-ji monastery. During this time, Snyder's first book Riprap was published, printed in Kyoto by Cid Corman and distributed through City Lights Books.

Snyder married Joanne Kyger in Kyoto in February 1960. From late 1961 to early 1962, the pair spent six months travelling in Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal. They joined Allen Ginsberg in New Delhi and visited with the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala. Snyder returned to San Francisco in May 1964, and that fall he taught English classes at the University of California, Berkeley. Snyder and Kyger divorced in 1965, and he returned to Japan in October of that year.

On August 6, 1967, Snyder married Masa Uehara. The ceremony took place on the rim of an active volcano on Suwa-no-se, a small island north of Okinawa. Suwa-no-se was the site of the Banyan Ashram, founded by Nanao Sakaki, a poet, World War II veteran, and Japanese cultural radical. In 1967, Snyder briefly lived at the Banyan Ashram with the group of young people who gathered around Sakaki and called themselves Buzoku or Tribe.

In April 1968, Snyder's first son, Kai, was born in Kyoto. The family left Japan in December 1968 to make their home in California. A second son, Gen, was born in 1969. In 1970, Snyder took up residence with his wife and two young sons on San Juan Ridge, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, near Nevada City, California. With students and friends, Snyder built his home and named it Kitkitdizze, a Native American (Wintun) word for a local plant with a unique and pungent aroma. Snyder and Uehara divorced in 1989.

Snyder was a founding member of the "Ring of Bone" Zendo, a country-based Mahayana Buddhist sangha, which is located on his property on San Juan Ridge. Meetings and sesshin were first held in Snyder's barn in the 1970's and later moved to the Zendo after it was constructed in 1982. The Zendo was named "Ring of Bone" after the poem by Lew Welch. Although the Zendo is an affiliate of the Diamond Sangha in Hawaii, it functions as a completely independent and self-governing church.

Using Kitkitdizze as his home base, Snyder toured extensively, giving readings and talks, doing what he termed, "hunting and gathering." In addition to his numerous appearances in the United States and Canada, his lecture tours took him to Australia in 1981, Sweden, Scotland, and England in 1982, Taiwan in 1990, Spain in 1992, Ireland in 1995, and Greece and the Czech Republic in 1998, Korea and Japan in 2000, Japan and France in 2002, and Japan again in 2003.

Snyder married Carole Koda in April 1991 in a ceremony at Kitkitdizze. She is a writer and has two daughters, Mika and Robin. Of Japanese-American heritage, Koda grew up in the South Dos Palos area of the San Joaquin Valley of California on a large rice farm that had first been planted by her father's parents. Her father researched and founded the "Kokuho Rose" line of rice and was a pioneer in using airplanes to plant rice from the air.

Snyder became a faculty member in the Department of English at the University of California, Davis in 1986. He was instrumental in founding the "Nature and Culture" program (1993), an undergraduate academic major for students of society and the environment. He was also active in establishing "The Art of the Wild" (1992), an annual conference on wilderness and creative writing. The Academic Senate selected Snyder as the 2000 Faculty Research Lecturer, the University of California, Davis' highest faculty peer honor. He retired in 2002.

Recognition of Snyder's achievements includes the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his book Turtle Island, his appointment to the California Arts Council (1975-1979), and his induction into both the American Academy of Arts and Letters (1987) and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (1993). After his long poem cycle and forty-year work, Mountains and Rivers Without End, was published, he was presented with the 1997 Bollingen Prize for Poetry. In conferring the award, the judges observed, "Gary Snyder through a long and distinguished career, has been doing what he refers to in one poem as 'the real work.' 'The real work' refers to writing poetry, an unprecedented kind of poetry, in which the most adventurous technique is put at the service of the great themes of nature and love. He has brought together the physical life and the inward life of the spirit to write poetry as solid and yet as constantly changing as the mountains and rivers of his American -- and -- universal landscape." Snyder received the Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Grant in 1998. Also in 1998, he was honored with the Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Propagation of Buddhism) award for his outstanding contributions in linking Zen thought and respect for the natural world across a lifelong body of poetry and prose. In 2001, he was awarded the California State Library Gold Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Science.

Snyder continues his writing career at Kitkitdizze.

A detailed chronology follows this biography.

Sources:

"A Brief Biography." University of California, Davis. Dept. of English website. http://www.english.ucdavis.edu/faculty/snyder/a_brief_biography.htmAccessed August 20, 2003.

Donahue, James J. Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 275: Twentieth-Century American Nature Writers: Prose. A Bruccoli Clark Layman Book. Edited by Roger Thompason, Virginia Military Institute, and J. Scott Bryson, Mount St. Mary's College. Gale Group, 2003. pp. 294-302.

"Gary Snyder: A Brief Biography." Stanford Humanities Center, "Mountains and Rivers" workshop website. http://shc.stanford.edu/shc/1997-1998/97-98workshops/Gary.Snyder.htmlAccessed Sept. 29, 2003.

"Gary Snyder & John Suiter, In Conversation-May 15, 2002." Commonwealth Club website. http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/02/02-05snyder-suiter-speech.htmlAccessed August 27, 2003.

McLeod, Dan. "Gary Snyder." Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 16: The Beats: Literary Bohemians in Postwar America. Detroit: Gale Research Co., 1983. p. 486-500.

Murphy, Patrick D. A Place for Wayfaring: The Poetry and Prose of Gary Snyder. Corvallis, OR: Oregon State University Press, 2000.

Ring of Bone Zendo Newsletter. Oct. 15, 1986; March 10, 1987; March 7, 1988.

Snyder, Gary, Wendell Berry, and Carole Koda. Three on Community. Boise, Idaho: Limberlost Press, 1996.

Suiter, John. Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2002.

Yamazato, Katsunori. "Snyder, Sakaki, and the Tribe." Gary Snyder: Dimensions of a Life. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1991.

Gary Snyder Chronology
Date Event
1930
Gary Snyder born (May 8) in San Francisco, California, first of two children born to Harold and Lois Wilkie Snyder.
1932
Snyder's family moves to country land near Lake City, Washington and starts a small dairy.
Sister, Anthea, born.
1942
Family moves to Portland, Oregon.
1943-1945
Enters high school in Portland.
Works summers at camp on Spirit Lake, Washington.
Summer of 1945 climbs Mt. St. Helens.
1946-1947
Joins the Portland Mazamas, a mountaineering club.
Works summers for United Press and as a copy boy for the Portland Oregonian.
Graduates from Lincoln High School.
Climbs a number of Pacific Northwest snowpeaks.
1947
Summer, backpacks in the southern Washington Cascades.
Climbs Mt. Rainier.
Begins undergraduate study at Reed College, Portland, Oregon.
1948
Summer, hitchhikes to New York City, gets seaman's papers and ships out in the Marine Cooks and Stewards Union.
Visits Colombia and Venezuela.
1949
Summer, works on the trail crew for the U.S. Forest Service, Columbia National Forest (now the Gifford Pinchot National Forest).
1950
Publishes first poems in Reed College student publication Janus.
Marries Alison Gass.
Summer, works for U.S. Park Service excavating the archaelogical site of old Fort Vancouver.
1951
Spring, graduates from Reed College with BA in Anthropology and Literature, senior thesis, The Dimensions of a Haida Myth.
Summer, works as timber scaler on Warm Springs Indian Reservation, backpacks in the Olympic Mountains.
Fall, begins graduate program in Anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, but stays only one semester.
1952
Spring, returns to San Francisco, does odd jobs, lives with poet Philip Whalen.
Summer, works as lookout at Crater Mountain, Mt. Baker National Forest.
Divorces Alison Gass.
1953
Summer, works as a lookout in Mt. Baker National Forest on Sourdough Mountains, works on Myths & Texts.
Fall, meets Kenneth Rexroth.
1953-1955
Graduate student, East Asian Languages Department, University of California, Berkeley.
1954
Summer and fall, works as choker-setter for Warm Springs Lumber Company, Oregon.
1955
Summer, works on trail crew, Yosemite National Park.
Long backpack trip in the Minarets and headwaters of the Kern.
Fall, continues East Asian language study at U.C. Berkeley and translates Han-Shan.
Meets Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in San Francisco.
Poetry reading at Six Gallery in San Francisco.
Lives with Jack Kerouac in cabin in Mill Valley.
1956
May, by freighter to Kyoto, Japan, lives in Zen Temple Shokoku-ji.
Studies under Miura Isshu Roshi.
Summer, with Japanese climber friends, backpacks and climbs in the Northern Japanese Alps.
1957
August, boards S.S. Sappa Creek in Yokohama, works as wiper in engine room.
Visits Persian Gulf five times, Italy, Sicily, Turkey, Okinawa, Wake, Guam, Ceylon, Samoa, Hawaii.
1958
April, disembarks in San Pedro, returns to San Francisco.
Shares Marin cabin with Lew Welch, spends nine months involved in the literary scene.
1959
Returns to Kyoto, Japan and begins study under Oda Sesso Roshi at the Daitoku-ji monastery.
Riprap published, printed in Kyoto and sold through City Lights Books, San Francisco.
1960
Myths & Texts published by Totem Press.
Marries Joanne Kyger in Kyoto.
1961-1962
Kyger and Snyder go to India by boat, travel extensively in Sri Lanka, India, and Nepal.
Join Allen Ginsberg in New Delhi.
Visit with the Dalai Lama in Dharamshala.
1963
Allen Ginsberg visits Kyoto.
Snyder and Ginsberg first meet poet Nanao Sakaki.
1964
May, Snyder returns to the West Coast.
Summer, long backpack trip in the Sierra in Bubbs Creek country.
Fall, teaches English poetry workshops and classes at U.C. Berkeley.
1965
Summer, participates in Berkeley Poetry Conference (Robert Duncan, Charles Olson, Jack Spicer, James Koller, Lew Welch, Allen Ginsberg, and others.)
Long trip with Ginsberg to British Columbia where the two climb Glacier Peak in the North Cascades.
October, returns to Japan.
Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End published by Grey Fox Press.
Kyger and Snyder divorce.
1966
Meets Masa Uehara.
Visits U.S., participates in the "Gathering of the Tribes" in Golden Gate Park.
A Range of Poems published in England.
Oda Sesso Roshi dies.
1967
March, returns to Japan.
Summer at Banyan Ashram on Suwa-no-se Island in the East China Sea.
Marries Masa Uehara there.
Winter, studies with Nakamura Sojun Roshi at Daitokuji.
1968
Son, Kai, born in Kyoto.
Returns to U.S., receives Levinson Prize from Poetry (Chicago), and is awarded Guggenheim Fellowship.
Publishes The Back Country.
Father, Harold Snyder dies.
1969
Son, Gen, is born.
Earth House Hold published.
Summer, backpacks with Nanao Sakaki in high Sierra.
Visits environmental activists around the U.S., distributes "Smokey the Bear Sutra" at Sierra Club Wilderness Conference, San Francisco.
1970
Moves to San Juan Ridge, north of the South Yuba river, in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada.
Builds his house, "Kitkitdizze," with friends and students.
Regarding Wave published.
1971
Reads paper, "The Wilderness" at the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, Santa Barbara.
1972
June, attends United Nations Conference on the Environment, Stockholm, Sweden.
July, travels throughout Hokkaido, Japan researching wildlife, climbs in the Daisetsu Mountain Range.
1973
The Fudo Trilogy published.
1974
Turtle Island published.
1975
Awarded Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island.
First MLA panel on Snyder's poetry held in San Francisco.
1975-1979
Appointed member of the Board of the California Arts Council.
1976
First critical book-length study of Snyder's work published: Bob Steuding, Gary Snyder.
1977
The Old Ways published.
1979
He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (based on Reed College thesis) published.
1980
The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979 published.
1981
Summer, trip with family to Japan.
Fall, poetry readings in Australia with Nanao Sakaki.
1982
Summer, "Ring of Bone" Zendo built.
Fall, readings in Sweden, Scotland, and England.
1983
Axe Handles and Passage through India published.
Second critical study, Gary Snyder's vision by Charles Molesworth, appears.
1984
Fall, travels in the Peoples' Republic of China as guest of the Writers' Union together with Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Allen Ginsberg, and others.
1986
Begins teaching at U.C. Davis.
Left Out in the Rain published.
1987
Inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Travels in the Brooks Range of Alaska.
1989
Awarded the Fred S. Cody Memorial Award.
Masa Uehara and Snyder divorce.
1990
Yuba Watershed Institute established.
Readings in Taiwan.
Practice of the Wild published.
1991
Marries Carole Koda.
Fall, Snyder, Koda and Sakaki travel in Japan.
1992
Travels in Ladakh and readings in Spain.
No Nature published.
1993
Elected into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
1994
Travels in Botswana and Zimbabwe with Kai and Gen Snyder.
1995
A Place in Space published.
Readings in Ireland.
Fall, trip to Nepal with Carole Koda and daughter, trek to Base Camp on Sagarmatha (Everest).
1996
Travels to France for cave art study.
Mountains and Rivers Without End published.
1997
Awarded the Bollingen Prize for poetry and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.
1998
Travels to Japan for Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (Society for the Propagation of Buddhism) award.
Readings in Greece and in the Czech Republic.
Receives Lannan Award and a Lila Wallace Reader's Digest Grant to support literary and educational programs in the rural Sierra Nevada.
1999
Gary Snyder Reader published.
2000
Named U.C. Davis Faculty Research Lecturer.
2001
Awarded the California State Library Gold Medal for Excellence in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
2002
Retires from U.C. Davis.
Look Out and The High Sierra of California published.
Acquisition information:
Special Collections began acquiring the collection from Gary Snyder in 1983. As of 2003, the collection consists of 270 linear feet and it continues to grow.
Processing information:

In October 2002, the General Library, Department of Special Collections at the University of California, Davis was awarded an $86,765 grant from the U.S. Institute of Museum and Library Services, Library Services and Technology Act (LSTA) administered by the California State Librarian to develop a finding aid for the Gary Snyder Papers to be mounted on the Online Archive of California (OAC). The project was also supported by in-kind funds from the General Library, University of California, Davis to process the collection. Additionally, the grant provided for the cataloging of a select group of monographs and serials in the Papers to make them accessible through the OCLC union catalog.

Daryl Morrison, Head of Special Collections, served as Project Manager. She administered the grant project, set work goals, held weekly meetings to discuss technical issues, and provided reports. The Gary Snyder Grant Project Advisory Committee evaluated progress on the grant project and provided technical advice. Sara Gunasekara and Melissa Tyler were the Project Archivists. In 1995, Pamela Pogojeff and John Skarstad created a finding aid for material that had been acquired through the year 1983. Skarstad also assisted the archivists by providing historical background information on the collection. Gunasekara and Tyler arranged and described the material acquired since 1983 and reprocessed and integrated the earlier accession into a unified collection of 270 linear feet of material. As they created the new finding aid, the archivists entered their data into the locally developed Encoded Archival Description (EAD) Creation Application and XML templates. Jared Campbell, the project's Finding Aid Encoder/Metadata Coordinator and technical advisor, prepared the final version of the EAD finding aid for mounting on OAC. Programmer Jim Sylva provided additional technical support by designing XML templates and XSLT stylesheets. Special Collections student assistants Jenny Hodge, Debbie Pan, and Renee Therriault performed data entry work.

John Sherlock, Rare Books Librarian and principal author of the grant proposal, selected and directed materials to Monographs and Serials Cataloging. Original Cataloger, Elaine Franco, and Copy Cataloger Loretta Firestone provided cataloging from the Monographs Department, headed by Karleen Darr. Pat French, Head of Serials, oversaw serials cataloging by Willy Maulit. Assistance in translating Chinese and Japanese language materials was provided by East Asian Librarian Annie Lin, Japanese Language Specialist Terri Matsumura, and Chinese Language Cataloger Carolyn Geng.

Rules or conventions:
Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Access and use

Restrictions:

Collection is open for research with the exception of fourteen letters in Series 2, Box 214 which are restricted until September 8, 2038. Appropriate reading room rules and forms required for use.

Terms of access:

The Library holds physical ownership of the Gary Snyder Papers. Copyright to the materials found in the Gary Snyder Papers are protected by copyright law, chapter 17, of the U.S. Code. Users are responsible for satisfying any claimants of literary property. Requests to publish or use materials requires the "Requests for Permission to Use Materials Owned by UC Davis Library, Special Collections" and clearance by copyright holders.

Preferred citation:

[Identification of item], Gary Snyder Papers, D-050, Special Collections, UC Davis Library, University of California, Davis.

Location of this collection:
University of California, Davis, Special Collections, UC Davis Library
100 NW Quad
Davis, CA 95616-5292, US
Contact:
(530) 752-1621
speccoll@ucdavis.edu
Website