Anasazi (Author Biography)

Author Biography

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. His parents separated when he was very young, and he spent most of his early years living with his mother and sister on small farms in Washington and Oregon. Even as a youngster and teenager, Snyder was an avid outdoorsman and developed a strong reverence for all things natural — mammals, insects, trees, mountains, rivers, and anything else that was a part of the earth. He also held ancient North American and Far Eastern cultures in high regard and would eventually make their study and practice a part of his everyday life.

In 1951, he received degrees in both literature and anthropology from Reed College in Portland, Oregon. There, he became a part of the intellectual crowd that was often also the “party” crowd, and he and his friends experimented not only with a variety of hallucinogenic drugs and alcohol, but also with eastern philosophy, Indian mythology, and communal living. He spent most of his college years in one of the “Reed houses,” which were typically old houses close to campus that students rented, sharing in the household duties and monthly utility bills. Snyder had a preference for a home life that was village-like, similar to most Native American cultures in which all members were part of an extended family, and group effort and shared responsibilities — as opposed to individual achievement — were major tenets.

Snyder’s interest in Zen Buddhism was heightened by three years of graduate study in Asian languages at the University of California-Berkeley during the early 1950s. In 1956, he moved to Japan where he remained for 12 years studying, researching, and practicing Zen philosophy and also traveling throughout Asia. Returning to the United States in 1969, he and his wife (along with a dozen or so friends) erected a Japanese-style house in the foothills of the northern Sierras of California where the poet/anthropologist still lives today.

To date, Gary Snyder has published 16 books of poetry and prose. Turtle Island, containing “Anasazi,” won a Pulitzer Prize in 1975. The work he has produced over the decades has continued to transcend mere words on paper. Perhaps more than any other writer — and certainly more than most — Snyder lives the life that he advocates in his poems. He has supported the causes of environmentalism, Native American rights, communal living, and spiritual and sexual freedom from the political venue to the streets to his own home. The poignancy of work and community so prevalent in the Anasazi culture has always been a primary component of the poet’s own life, and what he writes is essentially what he lives. In his essay, “‘Thirty Miles of Dust: There Is No Other Life, ’” Snyder’s longtime friend Scott McLean tells us that “one cannot read Gary’s poetry without being constantly made aware of how much it is an expression of community life. His work argues that if one wants to touch the deepest levels of our humanity, one must learn within the relationships of responsibility that bind family, community, and place.”