Gary Snyder Obituary, Death – Gary Snyder is a well-known environmental activist, educator, and poet in the United States. On May 8, 1930, he entered the world in the United States. Many have called him the “poet laureate of Deep Ecology” and have drawn comparisons between his early work and the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. At various points in his career, Snyder won both the American Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
His work, in all of the roles that he has played, reveals an immersion not only in Buddhist spirituality but also in the natural world. His literary work has been translated into English from both classical Chinese and contemporary Japanese. Snyder was a member of the faculty at the University of California, Davis for a significant amount of time and also spent some of that time serving on the California Arts Council. Gary Sherman Snyder is the son of Harold Sherman Snyder and Lois Hennessy Snyder, and he was born in San Francisco, California.
Snyder’s genealogy can be traced back to Germany, Scotland, Ireland, and England. When he was two years old, his family relocated to King County, Washington, since they had fallen on hard times as a result of the Great Depression. In that location, they were responsible for the care of dairy cows, laying hens, a small orchard, and the production of cedar wood shingles. When Snyder was seven years old, he was injured in an accident that sidelined him for four months. “So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library,” he remembered in an interview, “and it was then I really learned to read and from that time on was voracious.
I figure that accident changed my life.” “So my folks brought me piles of books from the Seattle Public Library.” After a period of four months, I had completed more reading than the average person does before the age of eighteen. And I didn’t stop.”[3] In addition, during the 10 years that Snyder spent as a youngster in Washington state, he became aware of the presence of the Coast Salish people and acquired an interest in the Native American peoples in general as well as their traditional interaction with the natural world.
