What Gary Snyder brought to the Beat Generation of the mid-1950s and early 1960s he has augmented, reinforced, and intensified for the literary culture of the 1970s and 1980s. From his outset as a poet in the 1950s, Snyder's identification with the natural world and the values of simple living and hard physical work as well as his interest in Asian religious practices and literary traditions have informed his writing and influenced his contemporaries.

But for Snyder's audience, then as now, he has figured as something more than just a writer. Jack Kerouac recognized this when he modeled the hero of The Dharma Bums (1958) on his exuberant impressions of the young Snyder. While Allen Ginsberg and Neal Cassady represented in their different ways rather destructive responses to the alienation inherent in modern American technocracy, the example of Snyder's life and values offered a constructive, albeit underground, alternative...