Two of the most important writers, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, were attracted to Buddhist philosophy before they met Snyder or had heard of Watts. There is little doubt they were all attracted first by D.T. Suzuki's essays on Zen. Watts read Suzuki's essays as a teenager in England in the early 1930s, Snyder as a teenager in Oregon in the 1940s, and Ginsberg and Kerouac as undergraduates at Columbia University, where Suzuki himself was lecturing in the early 1950s. While Suzuki must be credited for introducing Zen thought to the West, it was Watts who made it popular among those disaffected by the repressive impact of organized Western religions, and in this way his work played a vital part in the great surfacing of the American subculture in the late 1950s and 1960s.
Born in Chislehurst, England, Alan Wilson Watts was reared in a comfortable, middle-class home in rural Kent, where he developed a keen appreciation of nature--reflected in the pantheistic views he was later to espouse in all of his work.
This is a free page. This page contains 159 words. This
biography contains 3,327 words (approx. 11 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our Alan (Wilson) Watts Access Pass.
