Born on May 8, 1930, in San Francisco, Gary Snyder grew up in the rural Pacific Northwest. He graduated from Reed College in 1951 with degrees in anthropology and literature, and later studied Japanese and Chinese civilization at Berkeley, returning there to teach in the English Department. After participating in the San Francisco revival, the beginning of the beat poetry movement, Snyder went to Japan in 1955 where he stayed for eighteen months, living in a Zen monastery. He has lived and written and worked in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada since 1969.
Anthony Hunt is the author of Genesis, Structure, and Meaning in Gary Snyder’s Mountains and Rivers Without End (2004). Now retired as professor of English at the University of Puerto Rico–Mayagüez, and a former Fulbright scholar and Peace Corps worker, he lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
Jack Shoemaker is Founding Editor of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Snyder for over 50 years.
