April 16, 1881 [Aurora, New York]–November 13, 1907 [Carmel, California]
Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), the son of Reverend Dr. William Hamilton Jeffers, a Presbyterian minister and scholar of ancient languages and Biblical history, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. Incredibly precocious, Jeffers was fluid in German and French (he studied in Europe) by the age of the twelve as well as versed in the Greek and Roman Classics. Jeffers obtained his B.A. from Occidental College at the age of 18 and then moved on to study at the University of Southern California. He started an affair Una Call Kuster, then married, in 1906 — it was discovered in 1910, at which point Jeffers studied for a semester in Seattle before returning to Los Angeles. The two married in 1913 and moved out of the city, settling finally in Carmel where Jeffers built Tor House and Hawk Tower. Jeffers’s career went through years of finding national fame but also periods where the controversy over his opinions — notably concerning World War II — hurt his reputation. Jeffers’s first book, Flagons and Apples (1912), written in metrical verse, is very much the work of a novice. His second, Californians (1916) contains some of the flowing, long-lined verse for which Jeffers became famous, but also includes some relatively metrical poems like the one included in his volume that reflect his time in Southern California.
