Gary Snyder was born on May 8, 1930 in San Francisco, California, and was raised in Washing ton state and Oregon. At Reed College he was part of a bohemian group that included Philip Whalen and Lew Welch, who joined him in San Francisco in the early 1950s. Snyder entered the Asian language program of the University of California in Berkeley, where he lived in a small cottage near the Young Buddhist Association and saved his money to study Buddhism in Japan. His friend Will Petersen recalls that Snyder wore blue jeans to read his poetry at the Six Gallery, whereas Ginsberg wore a charcoal gray suit, white shirt, and tie. Snyder was, according to his friend, "somehow certain of immortality, back then. In an impoverished Taoist unpublished poet sort of way. `Save the invitation [to the Six Gallery reading],' Gary confided, `Some day it will be worth something.'"
In Japan, Snyder wrote Petersen that he had come to realize "that I am firstmost a poet, doomed to be shamelessly silly, undignified, curious, cuntstruck, & considering (in the words of Rimbaud) the disorder of my own mind sacred. So I don't think I'll ever commit myself to the roll of Zen monk..." "Higashi Hongwani" and "Toji" were early poems from Japan.
Snyder's first book of poems, Riprap, was published by Origin Press in 1959 and reflect his experience in Yosemite in 1955 as a trail crew laborer laying "riprap," a kind of rock pavement set into an eroding trail. "Mid-August at Sourdough Mountain Lookout" and "Milton by Firelight" were inspired by his earlier summer jobs as a lookout ranger in the mountains of Washington. "Night Highway Niney-nine" described various trips hitchhiking from Seattle to San Francisco early in 1956, accormpanied at times by Allen Ginsberg. "Note on the Religious Tendencies" appeared in Liberation magazine in 1959.
Snyder's Smokey the Bear Sutra.