Gary Snyder is an American poet, essayist, and environmental activist best known for his association with the Beat Generation and the San Francisco Renaissance. A San Francisco native, Snyder was born in 1930. At the age of seven he was bed-ridden for four months from an accident, during which his love for literature developed as he did little else but read while he recovered. Snyder attended Reed College in Portland, Oregon, where he took an interest in Native American folklore and land practices, writing poetry, and sailing. The environment of the Pacific Northwest as well as his time spent working as a log scaler were immensely influential to the ecological themes of his poetry, but most of all it was his relationships with Native American residents of the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in Oregon that exposed him to relationships that other cultures have to the land. 
Snyder attended Indiana University for one semester, studying anthropology, before growing disillusioned with the field of anthropology and leaving to try to support himself as a poet. Around this time, Snyder began practicing Zen meditation and studying the ways of Buddhism. He decided to resume his studies at the University of California, Berkeley, this time studying Asian culture and language, and studied in Japan for a year in 1955. He would end up dividing his time between California and Japan. His poetry became characterized by his reverence for the land and nature around him through an eastern lens, and was distinctly influenced by the Japanese haiku and ancient Chinese writing — other influences of his include Walt Whitman and Ezra Pound.
In California, Snyder became friends with Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, and would inspire the main character of Kerouac’s 1958 novel The Dharma Bums. For a period beginning in 1966, he lived on a commune-style plot of land in California with Ginsberg and a group of American Zen practitioners. Snyder published nearly twenty collections of poetry and translations consistently between the 1960s and 1990s. Most notable of these were Turtle Island (1974), a collection of about sixty poems full of naturalistic imagery and preaching respect for the environment. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. No Nature (1992) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Snyder is not only known for his poetry, but for his environmental activism and status as a major figure of 1960s counter-culture.