Jeffers was born January 10, 1887,[2] 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. His brother was Hamilton Jeffers, a well-known astronomer who worked at Lick Observatory. Jeffers traveled through Europe during his youth and attended school in Germany, France, and Switzerland. An outstanding student, he was instructed in the classics and Greek and Latin language and literature. By age twelve, he was fluent in German and French as well as English. He earned his bachelor's degree from Occidental College at age 18. While attending college, he was an avid outdoorsman and active in the school's literary societies.
After he graduated from Occidental, Jeffers went to the University of Southern California (USC) to study at first literature, and then medicine. He met Una Call Kuster in 1906; she was three years older than he, a graduate student, and the wife of a Los Angeles attorney, Edward G. (Ted) Kuster. Jeffers and Una Kuster became lovers; Ted Kuster discovered their affair in 1910. Jeffers dropped out of USC medical school and enrolled as a forestry student at the University of Washington in Seattle, a course of study that he abandoned after a semester, at which time he returned to Los Angeles. By 1912 the affair became a scandal, reaching the front page of the Los Angeles Times. Una spent some time in Europe to quiet things down, then the lovers lived together by Lake Washington to await the completion of Una's divorce. The two were married in 1913, then moved to La Jolla, California for six weeks, and finally Carmel, California in 1914, where Jeffers later constructed Tor House and Hawk Tower.[3] The couple had a daughter who died a day after birth in 1913, and then twin sons, Donnan and Garth, in 1916. Una died of cancer in 1950. Jeffers died January 20, 1962;[4] an obituary can be found in the New York Times from January 22, 1962.
Tor House
Hawk Tower in CarmelIn 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. He spent most of his life in Carmel, California, in a granite house that he built with his own hands which they named "Tor House". Tor is a term for a craggy outcrop or lookout. Before Jeffers and Una purchased the land where Tor House would be built, they rented two cottages in Carmel, and enjoyed many afternoon walks and picnics at the "tors" near the site that would become Tor House.
To build the first part of Tor House, a small, two-story cottage, Jeffers hired a local builder, Michael J. Murphy. He worked with Murphy, and in this short, informal apprenticeship, he learned the art of stonemasonry. He continued adding on to Tor House throughout his life, writing in the mornings and working on the house in the afternoons. Many of his poems reflect the influence of stone and building on his life.
He later built a large four-story stone tower on the site called "Hawk Tower". While he had not visited Ireland at this point in his life, it is possible that Hawk Tower is based on Francis Joseph Bigger's 'Castle Séan' at Ardglass, County Down, which had also in turn influenced William Butler Yeats' choice of a poets tower, Thoor Ballylee. Construction on Tor House continued into the late 1950s and early 1960s, and was completed by his eldest son. The completed residence was used as a family home until his descendants decided to turn it over to the Tor House Foundation, formed by Ansel Adams, for historic preservation. The romantic Gothic tower was named after a hawk that appeared while Jeffers was working on the structure, and which disappeared the day it was completed. The tower was a gift for his wife Una, who had a fascination for Irish literature and stone towers. In Una's special room on the second floor were kept many of her favorite items, photographs of Jeffers taken by the artist Edward Weston, plants and dried flowers from Shelley's grave, and a rosewood melodeon which she loved to play. The tower also included a secret interior staircase – a source of great fun for his young sons.
