Influential and highly regarded in some circles, despite or because of his philosophy of "inhumanism", Jeffers believed that transcending conflict required human concerns to be de-emphasized in favor of the boundless whole.

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.

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.

To build the first part of Tor House, a small, two-story cottage, Jeffers hired a local builder, Michael J. Murphy.

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.

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.

Often styled after the epic form of ancient Greeks, these poems were full of controversial subjects such as incest, murder, and parricide.

Many books followed Jeffers's initial success with the epic form, including an adaptation of Euripides' Medea, which became a hit Broadway play starring Dame Judith Anderson.

Throughout the fifties and afterward Jeffers figured as an important voice for the worth and rights of the natural world, as the environmental movement gathered strength.

[5] In "The Double Axe" Jeffers explicitly described "inhumanism" as "a shifting of emphasis and significance from man to 'notman'; the rejection of human solipsism, and recognition of the trans-human magnificence...

It offers a reasonable detachment as rule of conduct, instead of love, hate and envy... it provides magnificence for the religious instinct, and satisfies our need to admire greatness and rejoice in beauty.

William Everson, Edward Abbey, Robert McDowell, Gary Snyder, and Mark Jarman are just a few recent authors who have been influenced by Jeffers.

Writer Paul Mooney (1904–1939), son of American Indian authority James Mooney (1861–1921) and collaborator of travel writer Richard Halliburton (1900–1939), "was known always to carry with him (a volume of Jeffers) as a chewer might carry a pouch of tobacco ... and, like Jeffers," writes Gerry Max in Horizon Chasers, "worshipped nature ... (taking) refuge (from the encroachments of civilization) in a sort of chthonian mysticism rife with Greek dramatic elements ..."[8] Jeffers was an inspiration and friend to western U.S. photographers of the early 20th century, including Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Morley Baer.

In fact, the elegant book of Baer's photographs juxtaposed with Jeffers's poetry,[9] combines the creative talents of those two residents of the Big Sur coast.

Several lines from Jeffers's poem "Wise Men in Their Bad Hours" ("Death's a fierce meadowlark: but to die having made / Something more equal to the centuries / Than muscle and bone, is mostly to shed weakness.")

Invoking (often at length) the poems "At the Birth of an Age," "Invasion," "Rock and Hawk," "Tamar," and "The Women at Point Sur," Taylor sees Jeffers as encouraging human beings to embrace the beautiful cruelty of an indifferent universe.