A report on The Dharma Bums, Michael McClure and Beat Generation

The Dharma Bums is a 1958 novel by Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac.

After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's The Dharma Bums.

He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's Big Sur.

At the event, other authors including Snyder, Kenneth Rexroth, Michael McClure, and Philip Whalen also performed."Anyway I followed the whole gang of howling poets to the reading at Gallery Six that night, which was, among other important things, the night of the birth of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Everyone was there. It was a mad night. And I was the one who got things jumping by going around collecting dimes and quarters from the rather stiff audience standing around in the gallery and coming back with three huge gallon jugs of California Burgundy and getting them all piffed so that by eleven o'clock when Alvah Goldbook was reading his poem 'Wail' drunk with arms outspread everybody was yelling 'Go! Go! Go!' (like a jam session) and old Rheinhold Cacoethes the father of the Frisco poetry scene was wiping his tears in gladness."

Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Ginsberg and Gary Snyder read on October 7, 1955, before 100 people (including Kerouac, up from Mexico City).

The Six Gallery reading informs the second chapter of Kerouac's 1958 novel The Dharma Bums, whose chief protagonist is "Japhy Ryder", a character who is actually based on Gary Snyder.