Gary Snyder: Chronology
Modern American Poetry's Chronology
Gary Snyder - Chronology - click here for original site at Modern American Poetry
1929 24 Oct.: Stock market crashes.
1930 8 May: Gary Snyder born in San Francisco; Hart Crane, The Bridge; Ezra Pound, A Draft of XXX Cantos.
1932 Snyder's family moves to Washington State; family is extremely poor during Depression years; Hart Crane commits Suicide; Sylvia Plath born.
1939 William Butler Yeats dies.
1941 7 Dec.: Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor; US enters Second World War.
1942 Snyder's family moves to Portland, Oregon.
1945 President Truman authorises dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; end of Second World War.
1946 William Carlos Williams, Paterson, Book One; Robert Lowell, Lord Weary's Castle.
1947 Autumn: Snyder begins undergraduate study at Reed College, Portland, Oregon, on scholarship.
1948 Summer: Snyder ships out for New York as seaman; John Berryman, The Dispossessed; Theodore Roethke, The Lost Son.
1950 Charles Olson, 'Projective Verse'; US population officially reaches 151 million; Snyder marries Alison Gass; Snyder publishes first poems in Reed College student publication; Summer: Snyder works for Park Service excavating the archaeological site of Fort Vancouver.
1950-l Snyder writes senior thesis at Reed: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth.
1951 Spring: Snyder graduates from Reed with BA in anthropology and literature; Summer: Snyder works as timber scaler on Warm Springs Indian Reservation, Oregon; Autumn: Snyder begins graduate programme in anthropology at Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, but stays only one semester.
1952 Spring: Snyder returns to San Francisco, does odd jobs, lives with Philip Whalen, also a Zen Buddhist; Summer: Snyder works as mountain forest lookout in Baker National Forest; divorces Alison Gass.
1953-6 Snyder studies Oriental culture and languages at University of California at Berkeley.
1953 Summer: Snyder works as lookout in Baker National Forest on Sourdough Mountain; Autumn: Snyder meets Kenneth Rexroth.
1954 Summer: Snyder works at lumber camp; Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems.
1955 Summer: Snyder works on trail crew at Yosemite National Park - experiential source of Riprap; translates Cold Mountain Poems; Autumn: the retrospectively named San Francisco Renaissance is inaugurated as Allen Ginsberg reads Howl at the Six Gallery, San Francisco; Snyder meets Ginsberg and Kerouac in San Francisco; lives with Kerouac in cabin in Mill Valley - source of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums; Wallace Stevens dies.
1956 May: Snyder goes to Japan for first time on scholarship from First Zen Institute of America; lives in Zen Temple; October: Ginsberg; Howl and Other Poems.
1957 August: Snyder boards Sappa Creek in Yokohama, works as wiper in engine room; visits: Persian Gulf five times, Italy, Turkey, Okinawa, Wake, Guam, Ceylon, Pago Pago, Samoa; Jack Kerouac, On the Road.
1958 April: Snyder gets off ship, returns to San Francisco; Jack Kerouac, The Dharma Bums.
1959-65 Snyder lives in Kyoto, Japan; studies under Zen master Oda Sesso Roshi.
1959 Snyder, Riprap; Robert Lowell, Life Studies; Robert Duncan, Selected Poems.
1960 Snyder, Myths & Texts; Donald Allen (ed.), The New American Poetry; Charles Olson, first volume of The Maximus Poems; Snyder marries Joanne Kyger.
1961 20 Jan.: Inauguration of J. F. Kennedy as US President; Allen Ginsberg, Kaddish.
1962 John Ashberry, The Tennis Court Oath.
1963 November: assassination of President Kennedy; William Carlos Williams dies; 11 Feb.: Sylvia Plath commits suicide.
1964-5 Snyder is lecturer in English at University of California at Berkeley.
1964 Snyder receives Bess Hoskin Prize; separates from Joanne Kyger.
1965-8 Snyder studies Zen Buddhism in Japan; race riots shake US.
1965 Snyder, Riprap, and Cold Mountain Poems; Six Sections from Mountains and Rivers Without End; Sylvia Plath, Ariel; T. S. Eliot dies; Autumn: Snyder returns to Japan; divorces Joanne Kyger.
1966 Snyder awarded prize by National Institute of Arts and Letters; returns to US; A Range of Poems published in England.
1967 March: Snyder returns to Japan, lives on Banyan Ashram, marries Masa Uehara on rim of active volcano.
1968-72 Student protests on US campuses across nation.
1968 Snyder publishes The Back Country; returns to US; receives Levinson Prize from Poetry (Chicago), and is awarded Guggenheim Fellowship; son Kai born; Charles Olson, Maximus Poems: IV, V, VI; assassination of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King.
1969 Snyder, Earth House Hold; Vine Deloria, Jr, Custer Died For Your Sins; Snyder's son Gen born.
1970 Snyder, Regarding Wave; Charles Olson dies; National Guard fires on students at Kent State University, Ohio.
1971 Snyder builds his own house, 'Kitkitdizze’, in foothills of Sierra Nevada.
1972 Ezra Pound dies; boundary 2: a journal of postmodern culture founded by William Spanos and Robert Kroetsch; Snyder attends United Nations Conference on Human Environment, Stockholm, Sweden.
1973 Snyder, The Fudo Trilogy; war in Vietnam officially over.
1974 Snyder, Turtle Island; Anne Sexton commits suicide.
1975 Snyder awarded Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Turtle Island; Olson, The Maximus Poems: Volume Three; 27 Dec.: first MLA panel on Snyder's poetry held in San Francisco.
1976 First critical book-length study of Snyder published: Bob Steuding, Gary Snyder.
1977 Snyder, The Old Ways; Robert Lowell dies.
1978 Snyder publishes his Reed thesis: He Who Hunted Birds in His Father's Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth.
1980 Snyder, The Real Work.
1983 Snyder, Axe Handles; second critical study of Snyder appears: Charles Molesworth, Gary Snyder's Vision.
1986 Snyder, Left Out in the Rain (previously unpublished poems written between 1947 and 1985).
1987 20 May: Snyder inducted into American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
1990 December: MLA panel in Chicago: 'Gary Snyder at 60'.
from Dean, Tim. Gary Snyder and the American Unconscious: Inhabiting the Ground.