Don Berry '51 is Reed's forgotten Beat and Oregon's forgotten great author. Berry is not nearly as well known as his Reed friends Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, and Philip Whalen, poets who helped define the Beat Generation, but his literary legacy might be more lasting and meaningful for Oregonians. He wrote three novels in the early 1960s that are easily the best ever written about the Oregon Territory. His first novel, Trask,is groundbreaking in its combination of historical research, real-life characters and settings, and Eastern philosophy. It is also a rip-roaring adventure story that Glen Love, a leading scholar of Northwest literature at the University of Oregon and Berry biographer, placed ahead of Sometimes a Great Notionby Ken Kesey, Honey in the Hornby H.L. Davis, and A New Lifeby Bernard Malamud as the best novel ever written and set in Oregon. "Those are the obvious choices," Love said. "But if I had to pick one book, it would be Trask.It's a great story, and there's so much more going on in it." Berry, 66, is a creative free spirit who has disdained a conventional career as a writer or anything else in favor of following his intellectual and spiritual whims around the world. He has not published a novel in more than 35 years, but in the last five years, he has created a remarkable body of work in cyberspace. An early, enthusiastic experimenter with computers and the internet, Berry has composed an amazing collection of full-length novels, short stories, essays, and artworks at his web site (www.speakeasy.org/berry). From that site, he has built what he calls the Dombri Maze, a hopscotch through the web that breaks down conventional notions of time and space.


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