The Joann Cohn Cazden Collection contains letters from Gary Snyder (1930-) to the then Joann Cohn (b. ca. 1930-), Snyder's poems and journal entries, and a small number of photographs and clippings. The collection spans the years 1945 to 1965, but the bulk of it dates 1945 to 1948 from a time when Cohn and Snyder were teenagers in Portland, Oregon. Much of the material has to do with the outdoors, camping, hiking, mountain climbing, love, poetry, and music. After doing her undergraduate work at Stanford University and receiving her MLS from the University of California at Berkeley, Cohn married Robert E. Cazden and lived for many years in Lexington, Kentucky. Gary Snyder, the influential poet, essayist, environmentalist, and lecturer, has written more than twenty books of poetry and prose including his forty-year work Mountains and Rivers Without End (1996) and Turtle Island for which he won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.

Joann Louise Cohn (b. ca. 1930-) attended high school in Portland, Oregon during the mid to late 1940s. Cohn and Gary Snyder (1930-) became friends in 1946 when they were both teenagers. They sent each other letters and poems when one or the other left Portland for vacation, summer camp, or later college. Cohn graduated from Stanford in 1952. She received a Masters degree in Library Science from the University of California at Berkeley in 1955. Cohn married Robert E. Cazden, and the couple and their children lived for many years in Lexington, Kentucky. Robert Cazden was a professor of Library Science at the University of Kentucky.

0.40 linear feet, 1 document case

Copyright is protected by the copyright law, chapter 17, of the U.S. Code. All requests for permission to publish or quote from manuscripts must be submitted in writing to the Head of Special Collections. Permission for publication is given on behalf of the Department of Special Collections, University of California, Library, Davis as the owner of the physical items and is not intended to include or imply permission of the copyright holder, which must also be obtained by the researcher.

Collection is open for research under regular Reading Room rules and copyright restrictions.