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The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
Bill Morgan (ed.)
The decades-long correspondence between two poets who could hardly have been more different, and who needed each other. Allen Ginsberg — urban, ecstatic, self-dramatizing — and Gary Snyder — spare, disciplined, mountain-and-monastery — began writing to each other in 1956 and kept it up for thirty-five years. Snyder became Ginsberg's model of the serious poet and his doorway into Buddhism; Ginsberg pulled Snyder into the Beat orbit. Edited from more than 850 letters by Ginsberg's biographer Bill Morgan, the selection doubles as a joint portrait of the two men and as an informal history of Beat writing, West Coast poetry, and American Buddhism. For readers of either poet, it is an intimate, illuminating record of a great literary friendship.
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The book
Edited by Bill Morgan — Allen Ginsberg's biographer, archivist, and bibliographer — and published by Counterpoint in 2009. It selects from the more than 850 letters the two poets exchanged between 1956 and 1991, drawing a portrait of one of the central friendships of postwar American poetry.
The friendship
Ginsberg and Snyder met in the San Francisco Renaissance of the mid-1950s (Snyder was the model for Japhy Ryder in Kerouac's The Dharma Bums). Ginsberg introduced Snyder to the East Coast Beats; Snyder, in turn, became Ginsberg's image of the disciplined poet and his guide into Buddhism, which fills much of their correspondence. Their letters track poems, travels, politics, and decades of spiritual searching.
How to read it
As biography and literary history in the raw — two major poets thinking aloud to each other across thirty-five years. Morgan's editing keeps the through-lines clear without smoothing away the texture of a real friendship.
For more context
Ginsberg's Collected Poems and Snyder's The Practice of the Wild; and Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, where their world is fictionalized.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Bill Morgan (ed.)
- Publisher
- Counterpoint
- Place of publication
- Berkeley, California
- Year
- 2009
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Biography & Memoir
- Location
- Maine