If Burroughs and Kerouac were the wild men of the Beat movement, Snyder was one of its steady, guiding lights. The other boys made names for themselves by writing about the underbelly of society. Snyder wrote about berries, trees, and the ordinary activities of daily life.

His poem "A Berry Feast" was read at the famous Six Gallery Reading. And we've gotta say, it was a welcome relief after "Howl," which slapped everyone in the room up-side the head.

Snyder was also the kind of O.G., real deal Buddhist. He wasn't just some urban malcontent who used religious principles to sell books (a criticism leveled at both Kerouac and Ginsberg), or some guy who hopped on the bandwagon when this stuff started getting really popular in the states.

He lived for extended periods in Japan from 1956 to 1969. Then he'd travel back to California, where he and Ginsberg bought land in the wilds of the Sierra Mountains. (We're a little jealous.) The San Francisco Renaissance of the Beat Movement was his bread and butter.

But his long and illustrious career logs a lot of personal growth. After starting out as a Beat poet, he became a Buddhist monk. Next, he survived the 1960s without overdosing or succumbing to capitalist rebranding. All this while writing some of the most engaging poetry of the 20th Century.

Oh, and winning both the Pulitzer Prize for poetry and the National Book Award. No big deal.

Mountains and Rivers Without End

Zen patience indeed. This masterpiece Mountains and Rivers Without End was forty years in the making. It's Snyder's epic poem that he began while he hung out with Ginsberg in India and lived in a wilderness cabin with Kerouac. It's not prototypical of Beat writing. But its anti-capitalistic ethos has stood the test of time.

Chew on This:

The Beat movement exploded, burned brightly, then quickly burned out. Arguably, it lasted only a decade before being absorbed into other movements. Check out Snyder's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Turtle Island, written in 1974. This work develops some of the saner, quieter ideas of the Beats. How are Buddhism and anti-capitalism, which were hallmarks of Beat literature, touched on in Snyder's later work?

Snyder was also a remarkable essayist. He wrote about many issues that are now part of the environmental movement. The Practice of the Wild reads like the literature that is included in the Ecocriticism movement. How does Snyder's work help fulfill many of the Beat generation's goals of overthrowing societal norms? What elements of environmentalism were born in Beat literature?