background on the beat generation at the Six
Gallery meeting.
The Six Gallery Meeting
III
Wally Henrick asked Ginsberg to organise what
was to be known as the famous “Six gallery
meeting”. Philip Lamantia, Michael
McClure, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg and Gary
Snyder read on October 7, 1955, on a plywood
stage of a renovated automobile repair shop,
before 100 people with Kerouac and others in the
audience. It was also a marker for the beginning of
the Beat movement (Beckett, 2012). Since the
1956 publication of Howl (City Lights Pocket Poets,
no. 4) and its obscenity trial in 1957 nationwide
attention had been garnered. The “Six Gallery
meeting” was an important entry point for Snyder
who would become known as “the Thoreau of the
beat generation”. The meeting of these great
minds was the formal beginning of the beat
generation and the shamanic revolution which was
to follow.
5