The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder

One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long-lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. When Allen Ginsberg ventured west in 1956, he met Snyder, a graduate student in the department of East Asian languages at the University of California. Snyder was living in a tiny cottage in Berkeley, sitting zazen, making tea, and writing poems, and he had already spent some time as a merchant mariner and as a solitary fire lookout in the Cascades. Ginsberg introduced Snyder to the East Coast Beat writers, including Jack Kerouac, while Snyder himself became the model for the serious poet that Ginsberg so wanted to become. Snyder encouraged Ginsberg to explore the beauty of the West Coast and, even more lastingly, introduced Ginsberg to Buddhism, the subject of so many long letter exchanges between them.
Beginning in 1956 and continuing through 1991, the two men exchanged more than 850 letters. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's biographer, has selected the most significant correspondence from this long friendship. The letters themselves paint the biographical and poetic portraits of two of America's most important - and most fascinating - poets. More