Back Essential Prose

Gary Snyder: Essential Prose

Edited by Jack Shoemaker

Introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson

Books have arrived in the LOA warehouse. Order your copy today, and it will be shipped to you immediately—ahead of the publication date.
In bookstores May 13, 2025.

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

This volume gathers the essential prose writings of our “poet laureate of Deep Ecology,” spanning the entire arc of his seventy-year career and sounding his deepest themes: How can we learn to tread lightly on the land we inhabit? What can ancient faiths and traditions teach us about living creatively and in community in the here and now? A companion to Snyder’s Collected Poems, it completes the definitive Library of America edition of his writings, which has been prepared in close collaboration with the author by his friend and longtime editor, Jack Shoemaker.

The volume begins with essays, memoirs, and poetic notebooks from Snyder’s landmark first prose collection, Earth House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries (1969). In “Lookout’s Journal,” he describes his life as a young fire spotter in the mountains of Washington State, and his emerging sense of vocation as a poet; in “Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji” and “Suwa-no-se Island and the Banyan Ashram,” he recounts his experiences as an initiate in a Kyoto monastery and in communal living on a remote island in the Ryukyus; and in “Buddhism and the Coming Revolution,” he foresees the “nation-shaking implications” of personal enlightenment and spiritual discovery.

Selections from He Who Hunted Birds in His Father’s Village: The Dimensions of a Haida Myth (1979) reflect Snyder’s lifelong studies in Native American religions and cultures. His sense of humor and conversational brilliance shine through in wide-ranging interviews from The Real Work (1980) and elsewhere. In chapters from Passage Through India (1984), his account of a six-month tour through South Asia with his wife Joanne Kyger and his friend Allen Ginsberg, he explores holy sites both ancient and modern, from the temples at Khajuraho to the Dalai Lama’s residence-in-exile at Dharamshala.

In The Practice of the Wild (1990), now considered a classic of American environmental writing in the tradition of Walden and A Sand County Almanac, Snyder offers an “exquisite, far-sighted articulation of what freedom, wildness, and grace mean, using the lessons of the planet to teach us how to live,” as Gretel Ehrlich puts it. Essays from A Place in Space (1995) and Back on the Fire (2007) explore bioregionalism, forestry practices, sustainability, and the ecosystems of the Sierra Nevada, where Snyder has lived since 1970. The Great Clod: Notes and Memoirs on Nature and History in East Asia (2016), included here in its entirety, meditates on the intersections of nature and culture in Asian art, literature, and history over millennia.

Volume features include an introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson—Snyder’s former colleague and frequent hiking partner—explanatory notes, a chronology of Snyder’s life, an essay on textual selection, and an index.

Jack Shoemaker, editor, is founding editor of Counterpoint Press, publishing the works of Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, M.F.K. Fisher, Evan S. Connell, Robert Aitken, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and James Salter, among many others. He has worked with Snyder for more than fifty years.

This Library of America series edition is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

This volume is available for adoption in the Guardian of American Letters Fund.
Table of Contents

Introduction by Kim Stanley Robinson

From Earth House Hold
Lookout’s Journal
Japan First Time Around
Spring Sesshin at Shokoku-ji
Buddhism and the Coming Revolution
Passage to More Than India
Poetry and the Primitive
Suwa-no-se Island and the Banyan Ashram

From He Who Hunted Birds in His Father Village
The Myth
Function of the Myth

From The Real Work
The Real Work
The East West Interview
Poetry, Community & Climax

From Passage Through India
The Cambodge
Pondicherry
Khajuraho
Dharamshala
Dalai Lama

From The Practice of the Wild
The Etiquette of Freedom
The Place, the Region, and the Commons
Tawny Grammar
Good, Wild, Sacred
Blue Mountains Constantly Walking
Ancient Forests of the Far West
On the Path, Off the Trail
Grace

From A Place in Space
Smokey the Bear Sutra
Four Changes, with a Postscript
“Energy Is Eternal Delight”
Unnatural Writing
The Porous World
Coming into the Watershed
Kitkitdizze: A Node in the Net

The Paris Review Interview
The Art of Poetry LXXIV

From Back on the Fire
The Ark of the Sierra
Ecology, Literature and the New World Disorder
Writers and the War Against Nature
Entering the Fiftieth Millennium
Lifetimes with Fire
Regarding “Smokey the Bear Sutra”

From Tamalpais Walking
Underfoot Earth Turns

The Great Clod
Summer in Hokkaido
All He Sees Is Blue: Basic Far East
The Great Clod: China and Nature
“Wild” in China
Ink and Charcoal
Walls Within Wall
Beyond Cathay: The Hill Tribes of China
Wolf-Hair Brush

Uncollected Essays
Walking the Great Ridge Ōmine on the Womb-Diamond Trail
Turn Off the Calculating Mind!

32.00 List Price: $40.00 (Save: 20%) Free shipping on orders $50 and over

Or buy from our partners

Phone orders: 1-800-964-5778 Request product #204075

ISBN: 978-1-59853-810-6 697 pages

LOA books are distributed worldwide by Penguin Random House

N° 391 Library of America Series

Subscribers can purchase the slipcased edition by signing in to their accounts.

Related Books

Gary Snyder: Collected Poems LOA N°357

What I Stand On: The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry 1969–2017 (boxed set)

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau LOA N°182

John Muir: Nature Writings LOA N°92

The Unknown Kerouac: Rare, Unpublished & Newly Translated Writings LOA N°283

Library of America

CURATOR

A champion of America’s great writers and timeless works, Library of America guides readers in finding and exploring the exceptional writing that reflects the nation’s history and culture.

Learn More

PUBLISHER

From poetry, novels, and memoirs to journalism, crime writing, and science fiction, the more than 300 volumes published by Library of America are widely recognized as America’s literary canon.

Browse our books Subscribe

NON-PROFIT

With contributions from donors, Library of America preserves and celebrates a vital part of our cultural heritage for generations to come.

Support our mission

Gary Snyder: Essential Prose

Related Books

Get 10% off your first Library of America purchase.