POETS ON THE PEAKS is author John Suiter's book about poets Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Jack Kerouac during their fire-lookout summers in the North Cascades during the 1950s. It is a book Based on scores of previously unpublished letters and journals, plus recent interviews with Snyder and Whalen and many of their friends, Poets on the Peaks creates a group portrait of Kerouac, Snyder, and Whalen that transcends the tired urban cliches of "Beat" life. Poets on the Peaks is about the development of a community of poets, including the famous Six Gallery reading of October 1955, and contains unexpected cameos by fellow poets and mountain-climbers Allen Ginsberg, Kenneth Rexroth, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Poets on the Peaks is also a book about Dharma and the years of Dharma Bums--from the 1951 roadside revelation in the Nevada desert that led Gary Snyder to drop out of academia and head for Japan, to Kerouac's lonely vigil with The Diamond Sutra on Desolation Peak, to Philip Whalen's ordination as a Zen priest. Finally, Poets on the Peaks is the story of the birth of a wilderness ethic, as well as a photographic homage to the Cascadian landscape, a landscape virtually unchanged since these men journeyed there thanks to the environmental protections they helped inspire.

JOHN SUITER is a writer-photographer living in Chicago since the fall of 2010. He is author of the critically acclaimed Poets on the Peaks: Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen & Jack Kerouac in the North Cascades, published in 2002 by Counterpoint Press. He is presently at work on a biography of Gary Snyder. (continue)