Gar Snyder is a legendary figure. The real-life original of Japhy Ryder -- traveling companion, friend and spiritual inspiration to the novelist Jack Kerouac -- he appears in that guise in Kerouac's 1959 novel, "The Dharma Bums." There, speaking as Ryder, he announces that, after study in the East, he intends to write an epic poem called "Mountains and Rivers without End." Following some early drafts, the poem finally appeared in 1996.
Snyder's career was launched in Japan. A native of the Pacific Northwest of the United States, he came to Japan in 1956 after doing graduate study at the University of California, Berkeley. He spent a number of years in Kyoto, partly practicing zazen at the renowned Zen temples of Daitokuji and Shokokuji.
Although he had written poetry for several years before this and was associated with the Beat movement then developing in California, "Riprap," his first book of poems, was published by a small press in Kyoto. After the first edition sold out quickly, leading to a second, the book was issued in the United States.