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CORVALLIS - Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Gary Snyder, whose writing about nature has met with both popular and critical acclaim, will deliver a free public lecture at Oregon State University on Thursday, Oct. 29.

His talk, "Gratitude to Trees: Buddhist Resource Management in Asia and California," will begin at 7:30 p.m. in LaSells Stewart Center, 26th Street and Western Boulevard in Corvallis.

Snyder was an important member of San Francisco's "Beat Generation" in the late 1950s, along with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other celebrated writers. Raised in the Pacific Northwest, he graduated from Reed College with degrees in literature and anthropology and began writing books of poetry and prose.

His book, "Turtle Island," won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1975. Another volume of selected poems, "No Nature," was a finalist for a National Book Award in 1992.

Snyder's most recent book is an epic poem called "Mountains and Rivers Without End." Thirty years in the making, it encompasses a variety of landscapes around the world and touches on Native American storytelling, Zen Buddhism, and Asian drama and art.

The San Francisco Chronicle called it "the story not only of one man, but also of the human event on the planet."

Publishers Weekly tabbed "Mountains and Rivers Without End" as one of its best books for 1996, and it won several prestigious awards, including the Bollingen Poetry Prize and the John Hay Award for Nature Writing.

A professor of English at the University of California-Davis, Snyder teaches creative writing and nature and culture. He has lived with his family in the South Yuba River watershed in northern California since 1970.

Snyder's OSU visit is part of two lecture series: the Ideas Matter series sponsored by the Department of Philosophy, and the English Department's Visiting Writers Series.