Gary Snyder, who will be 78 years old on May 8, won the $100,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize this week.  Called the “Thoreau of the Beat Generation” by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Snyder has been writing about the sacredness of the natural world for fifty years.  Snyder won a Pulitzer Prize for his collection of poems, Turtle Island, in 1974. 

During the mid-1950s through the Sixties, Snyder was a student and scholar of Zen Buddhism. He was most likely the person that Jack Kerouac based his character Japhy Ryder on in his novel, The Dharma Bums. The State Department refused to issue Snyder a passport in 1955 to attend a Zen institute in Japan for a year of study because it was alleged he was a Communist.  And so it goes.