Who is Gary Snyder from The Portable Beat Reader and what is their importance? The_Portable_Beat_Reader English & Literature Gary Snyder | The Portable Beat Reader

Gary Snyder is one of the major poets to emerge out of the San Francisco Renaissance in the mid-1950s. Snyder is also well known for his study of Zen Buddhism, especially the Zen Buddhism of Japan where he lived for a time as a monk. Snyder is born in 1930 in San Francisco but is raised in Washington and Oregon. Snyder is an avid mountain climber and spends many summers working as a lookout on mountains across the Northwest. Snyder is immortalized as the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac's "The Dharma Bums."