John Robinson Jeffers was born in Pittsburgh in 1887 and moved to Carmel-by-the-Sea with his wife Una in 1914 after plans to live in England fell through. A small inheritance from his father let him write full time. Nearly all his major poems were written while he lived at Tor House, on the rocky headland south of the village.
He wrote about the cliffs, hawks, kelp and surf of the coast, often in long narrative poems, and developed a philosophy he called inhumanism, which put the non-human world ahead of human concerns. He opposed American entry into World War II, a stand that was controversial.
He died in 1962. Today his work is read as an early voice of the environmental movement.