of Patchen's biggest literary supporters was the novelist Henry Miller, who wrote a long essay on Patchen, entitled Patchen: Man of Anger and Light, in 1946. In this essay, Miller wrote, "Patchen's pacifism is closely tied to what he sees as the loss of innocence in society, the corrupted human spirit, and is often expressed with animals. Such is the case with the forbidding 'The Lions of Fire Shall Have Their Hunting.'" Patchen also had a close, lifelong friendship with the poet E.E. Cummings, which began when they were both living in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Patchen was also a close peer of the West Coast poet Kenneth Rexroth, who shared Patchen's antiwar radicalism and his interest in combining poetry readings with jazz accompaniment. The two poets began a correspondence in the late 1940s and continued it in the 1950s. Rexroth encouraged the Patchens to move to San Francisco in the early 1950s. Influence In the 1950s, Patchen became a major influence on the younger beat poets, including Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. Miriam Patchen recalled some of these young poets, including Philip Lamantia, Gary Snyder, and Michael McClure, visiting the Patchens' home in San Francisco to pay their respects. However, once the Beats' popularity grew, Patchen disliked being associated with them and was highly critical of their glorification of drug use and what he perceived to be a strong desire for media attention and fame. Patchen referred to "Ginsberg and Co." and the media hype surrounding them as a "freak show." Awards In 1936, soon after the release of his first book, Patchen was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1944, he won the Ohioana Award for his book Cloth of the Tempest. He received the Shelley Memorial Award in 1954. He received a $10,000 grant for his contribution to American literature from the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities in 1967. Musical collaborations and recordings In 1942 Patchen collaborated with the composer John Cage on the radio play The City Wears a Slouch Hat. In the 1950s Patchen collaborated with the jazz bassist and composer Charles Mingus, reading his poetry with Mingus' group, but no recordings of the collaboration are known to exist. In the late 1950s Moe Asch of Folkways Records recorded Patchen reading his poetry and excerpts from one of his novels. These recordings were released as Kenneth Patchen Reads with Jazz in Canada (1959),