Tor is a term for a craggy outcrop or lookout. He spent most of his life in Carmel, California, in a granite house that he had built himself called ' Tor House and Hawk Tower'. In the 1920s and 1930s, at the height of his popularity, Jeffers was famous for being a tough outdoorsman, living in relative solitude and writing of the difficulty and beauty of the wild. Jeffers died in 1962 an obituary can be found in the New York Times, January 22, 1962. The couple had a daughter who died a day after birth in 1914, and then twin sons (Donnan and Garth) in 1916. After Una spent some time in Europe to quiet things down, the two were married in 1913, and moved to Carmel, California, where Jeffers constructed Tor House and Hawk Tower. Sometime before this, he and Una had begun an affair that became a scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times in 1912. In 1910 he enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course of study that he abandoned after less than one year, at which time he returned to Los Angeles. He met Una Call Kuster in 1906 she was three years older than he was, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney. At school, he was an avid outdoorsman, and active in the school's literary societies.Īfter he graduated from Occidental, Jeffers went to the University of Southern California to study at first literature, and then medicine. At sixteen he entered Occidental College. He was a child prodigy, interested in classics and Greek and Latin language and literature. He traveled through Europe during his youth and attended school in Switzerland.

His family was supportive of his interest in poetry. His brother was Hamilton Jeffers, who became a well-known astronomer, working at Lick Observatory.

William Hamilton Jeffers, and Annie Robinson Tuttle. Jeffers was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania (now part of Pittsburgh), the son of a Presbyterian minister and biblical scholar, Reverend Dr.

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