During his lifetime Philip Whalen (1923–2002) authored some twenty collections of verse, more than twenty broadsides, two novels, a huge assemblage of autobiographical literary journals, nine or ten experimental prose works, and dozens of critical essays, lectures, commentaries, introductions, prefaces, and interviews. He is remembered primarily as a Zen Buddhist poet-monk of the San Francisco Renaissance and Beat generation who read his work at the famous October 1955 Six Gallery reading organized by Allen Ginsberg and emceed by Kenneth Rexroth.
What began as a series of loosely organized readings, publications, and meetings has been read as a unified narrative of the literary and artistic life of the San Francisco Bay Area during the late 1950s and early 1960s … an emphasis on the creative imagination, enthusiasm, and transcendence to the exclusion of more problematic areas of skepticism, irony, and existential despair … — Michael Davidson[1]
