Jeffers then attended private schools in Pittsburgh, Germany, and Switzerland; by age twelve he had read widely in English, French, German, Latin, and Greek. In 1902, when he was fifteen, he entered the University of Western Pennsylvania (now the University of Pittsburgh), but transferred to Occidental College in 1903 when his father's health prompted a move to Los Angeles. At Occidental, Jeffers studied astronomy, geology, ethics, history, economics, rhetoric, biblical literature, and Greek, among other subjects, and edited the college's literary magazine. In 1905-1906, he took graduate courses in literature at the University of Southern California, and fell in love with a student in one of his classes, Una Call Kuster, then twenty and already married; Jeffers was eighteen. After spending the 1906-1907 academic year at the University of Zurich, where he studied literature, history, and philosophy, Jeffers studied medicine for three years at the University of Southern California (including a semester when he taught physiology) not to become a doctor but to continue preparing himself as a poet.
Jeffers went to the University of Washington in Seattle in 1910, thinking that this time separation might end the affair with Una Kuster, and that as a forester he could both save trees and have time to write.
This is a free page. This page contains 181 words. This
biography contains 9,371 words (approx. 31 pages at 300
words per page).
Read the rest of this Biography with our (John) Robinson Jeffers Access Pass.
