A teacher, publisher, poet, actor, novelist, and playwright as well as an editor, George Hitchcock produced 64 issues of Kayak in San Francisco and then Santa Cruz, California. Describing itself as being "particularly hospitable to surrealist, imagist and political poems; prose poems and vehement articles on modern poetry," the magazine featured over its twenty-year span a fairly consistent group of writers including Robert Bly, Philip Levine, W. S. Merwin, Charles Simic, David Ignatow, Hayden Carruth, and Wendell Berry, as well as figures like David Antin, Kathleen Fraser, Paul Blackburn, Gary Snyder, and Anselm Hollo who are usually associated with other literary communities. Kayak also published occasional English translations of influential writers such as François Villon, Rafael Alberti, Paul Eluard, and Georg Trakl. Distinguishing the magazine visually are its covers and numerous illustrations featuring eclectic nineteenth-century drawings and engravings as well as contemporary collages. In 1968 Kayak was awarded $10,000 by the National Council on the Arts for its contributions "made in advancing the cause of the unknown, obscure or difficult writer, and in the publication of books visually and typographically distinctive."