Young Robert Duncan

Robert Duncan was the heart of the San Francisco Renaissance -- the literary and countercultural movement that prefigured Black Mountain, the Beats, and the hippies. Duncan functioned as shaman of an emerging aesthetic grounded in magic, polytheism, and sexual freedom, a role that he cultivated in weekly Berkeley literary salons. For his biographer, Ekbert Faas, the mystic-poet Duncan was a harbinger of the coming cultural revolution, the iconic "guru" figure who, in the late 1940s, pried opened the door to the late 1960s.