Michael McClure is a poet, playwright, songwriter and novelist, who found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac’s Dharma Bums. McClure’s first book of poetry, Passages, was published in 1956. His poetry is heavily infused with an awareness of nature, especially in the animal consciousness that often lies dormant in mankind. In 1967, McClure read at the famous Human Be-In event in Golden Gate Park, San Francisco and transcended his Beat label to become an important member of the Sixties hippie counterculture. McClure has published eight books of plays and four collections of essays, including essays on Bob Dylan and the environment. His fourteen books of poetry include Jaguar Skies, Dark Brown, Huge Dreams, Rebel Lions, Rain Mirror and Plum Stones. His work as a novelist includes the autobiographical The Mad Cub and The Adept.
His journalism has been featured in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The L.A. Times and The San Francisco Chronicle. He has received numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, an Obie Award for Best Play, an NEA grant, the Alfred Jarry Award and a Rockefeller grant for playwriting.
Kerouac admired McClure, whom he referred to in Big Sur as, “the handsome young poet who’s just written the most fantastic poem in America, called Dark Brown…”
