Gary Snyder

In 1950, Snyder got married to Alison Gass but the two divorced after 7 months. He remained single for the next eight years of his life.

In 1958, while he was travelling back and forth from Japan he met with a poet Joanne Kyger and he got married to her in 1960 after his Zen teacher insisted that if they are to live together, they must get married.

In 1967, he married Masa Uehara, a woman he met in Osaka. They both moved to California after marriage and had two sons together - Kai and Gen. After 22 years, he separated with Masha Uehara and married Carole Lynn Koda.

Gary Snyder was born on 8 May 1930 in San Francisco, California, to Harold and Lois Hennessy Snyder. His family was greatly affected by the Great Depression and in order to make a living they moved to Washington.

Snyder was an avid reader from a very young age. When he was 7 years old, he met with an accident and was bedridden for four months and during that time he read rapaciously. He moved to Oregon at 17.

In 1942, Snyder’s parents got divorced and he started to live in Portland with his mother and sister. His mother was a reporter at The Oregonian. He went to the Lincoln High School and worked as a paper boy and camp counselor.

In 1947, he secured admission on a scholarship at the Reed College. Here, he made a number of author friends - Lew Welch, Philip Whalen, Carl Proujan, etc. During this time, he got his first set of poems published.

In 1948, he started working as a seaman for which he had to join the Marine Cooks and Stewards union to get that job. Working as a seaman helped Snyder to understand other cultures, an interest he developed since he was 10.

In 1953, Snyder decided to get admission at the University of California, Berkeley, in order to study Asian languages and culture. He studied poetry and traditional culture here and spent rest of his time doing part-time work.

In 1955, he was offered a year old scholarship to get trained in Zen in Japan but he was denied a passport as he was an alleged ‘communist’. But after some changes in the policy he got to visit Japan.

In Japan, initially, he worked as an English tutor and personal attendant to Miura Isshu in Shokoku-ji, Kyoto. He started taking Japanese classes so that he can study koan. He eventually became Miura’s disciple and became a Buddhist in 1955.

In 1958, he came back to the Unites States and became a crewman in ‘Sappa Creek’ and went back to Japan and became first foreign disciple of Roshi and for the next 11 years he kept studying Zen.

From 1958-1969, he worked on translations with Sasaki and lived on the island of Suwanosejima with a bunch of other co-disciples like. He worked professionally in Japan while he was living the life of a monk.

In 1974, his book ‘Turtle Island’ won a Pulitzer Prize. The book was named after a native American name for the North American Continent and reflected his experiences with the native culture of America.