Gary Snyder: ‘Our Western Thoreau’

Travel Blog  •  Jim Benning  •  02.28.07 | 3:35 PM ET

backonthefire

Gary Snyder might be best known as the inspiration for the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s novel “The Dharma Bums.” But Snyder is also a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet and a fine essayist who has devoted much of his life to exploring ecology and Eastern philosophy. While he’s not exactly a travel writer, he has evoked the Sierra Nevada mountain range in his various works about as well as anyone. Which is why we note a new book from him, Back on the Fire: Essays.

He writes in the book about migration, literature and fire ecology, among other topics.

Thomas Curwen praises the collection in Sunday’s Los Angeles Times and concludes:

“Today, at the age of 76, Snyder still lives on the San Juan Ridge, where he has made his home since the late 1960s…His hair is gray. His wife, Carole Lynn Koda, to whom this book is dedicated, died last June. But his values, in a world often rife with muddled, contentious thought, are as clear and unwavering as they have ever been. He is surely our western Thoreau.”