SOURCE: "The Critter Poet," in The New Republic, Vol. 216, No. 12, March 24, 1997, pp. 38-42.

In the following review, Benfey reconsiders Snyder's career from the 1950s to the present.

Gary Snyder was a character in a novel before he published his own first book. In Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums, that vivid account of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance and the Beat movement, there is a biographical sketch of Japhy Ryder, "the number one Dharma Bum of them all":

Japhy Ryder was a kid from eastern Oregon brought up in a log cabin deep in the woods with his father and mother and sister, from the beginning a woods boy, an axman, farmer, interested in animals and Indian lore so that when he finally got to college by hook or crook he was already well equipped for his early studies in anthropology and later in Indian myth...