He lived a picaresque life including stints as a cowboy, medical doctor and psychologist, a decade of field work in Native American linguistics and anthropology, and over forty years participation in the literary-artistic-bohemian culture of the San Francisco Bay Area.
[1] De Angulo began his career in field linguistics and anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley in the early 1920s, shortly after his marriage to L. S. ("Nancy") Freeland.
As a linguist he contributed to the knowledge of more than a dozen native Northern Californian and Mexican Indian languages and music-systems and collected additional field data on their cultures and oral traditions.
[3]: 253-273 De Angulo's Bohemian lifestyle disconcerted college manners and social hypocrisies and contributed to his not pursuing a normal academic career.
[3]: 37 [5] At this point his writings took a turn into fiction and poetry, much of which he justified as alternative techniques of presenting in accessible format the ethnographic detail he had collected.
Perceptions of de Angulo swing wildly; he is seen variously as a gifted but inconsistent field ethnographer, an ‘‘Old Coyote,’’ an anarchist hero and talented subversive.