[Item #4547] The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder.
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder
The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder

The Selected Letters of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder

Berkeley, CA: Counterpoint Press, 2009. First Printing. Hardcover. "Allen and I came from the far ends of the nation. I was from the German and Scandinavian working farmer / logger / fisherman world of pre-WWII Puget Sound, Allen from the New York City Immigrant Left. We met in a backyard in Berkeley, and again in Kenneth Rexroth's wood-floored apartment in the foggy Avenues zone of San Francisco. The fall of 1955 was the end of graduate school for both of us. We argued a lot and were not easy on each other. I made him walk more, and he made me talk more. It was good for both of us. In that first Bay Area eight months, he and his buddy Jack Kerouac managed to push the already strong but reticent Bay Area poetic culture into public light, with a deliberate intention for some sort of transformation, first literary and then social. We hitchhiked to the Canadian border and back in the middle of winter giving readings in Portland and Seattle. I left the coast in May of 1956 for a long stay in Japan (sailing by passenger-freighter), and that was the beginning of our correspondence. Living in different parts of the world as we did for most of the later years, we stayed in touch the old way, with letters. Allen was remarkable for his transgressive sanity. I swung between extremes of Buddhist scholar and hermit nerdiness and tanker-seamen craziness at bars and parties. I sense, reading these letters again, that our mutual respect continued to grow. A lot of the time we were just working out the details, trail routes, land-management plans--and that's where the "real work" is. His apartment on the Lower East Side, my hand-built house at the end of a long dirt road in the far far West, were our hermitages, base camps, and testing grounds. It was all just dust in the wind, but also, the changes were real." (Gary Snyder, from 'A Note from Gary Snyder' at Intro). So commences this wonderful collection of letters between Beat Giants Gary Snyder & Allen Ginsberg, without whom Mid-Century American Literature as we know it would simply not exist. For students of these two great writers (and for Mid-Century American Literature as a whole), this book is simply a must, overflowing with maxims from the great Wisdom Traditions and practical sagacity for the Working Writer. Hardcover in unclipped dust jacket, First Edition, First Printing as indicated by number sequence on copyright page. Book in very fine condition with only slight bump to top right, bottom right-hand corners of front cover and single bump to bottom left-hand corner of back cover. Dust-jacket is in very fine condition as well, with only single bump to bottom right-hand corner of front cover; same single bump to bottom left-hand corner of back cover. Very Fine / Very Fine. [Item #4547]

Price: $35.00