afternoons” (Brophy 6). After the day’s work was done, “there were awesome sunsets, walks under the constellations, reading by kerosene lamps (electricity came only in 1949), [and] occasional trips to the tower parapet to attune his micro-cosm to the universe of stars and galaxies” (Brophy 6). From 1924 to 1938, Jeffers published ten books. Consequently, “Jeffers’s literary reputation skyrocketed in the 1920s [and] crested in the 30s—” he was voted into the National Institute of Arts and Letters and was awarded with honorary in Humane Letters from Occidental College (Brophy 4, Zaller xiv). In 1941, Jeffers went on a reading and speaking tour paid for by the Library of Congress; he somehow also found time to complete and release Be Angry at the Sun. Three years later, Jeffers was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters. This honor was followed by his much-liked remake of Medea which was featured on Broadway in 1947 by the National Theatre (Zaller xiv). Life took a turn for the worse in 1948. On a trip to Ireland with Una, Jeffers nearly died of pleurisy (Brophy 7). That same year, he published The Double Axe which “produced a dramatic downturn in his critical reputation” (Brophy 5). For several years before it arrived, Jeffers had been predicting and fearing a second World War. His poems in The Double Axe were so harsh and “capable of patriotically motivated treason” that Random House publishers put a disclaimer on the book in an effort to “disassociate themselves” from Jeffers’ views (Butterfield 416). Many of Jeffers’s poems openly criticized the authority and decisions of world leaders—Stalin, Roosevelt, and Hitler—and the negative events that came as consequences of their choices (Coffin). In addition to a downfall in reputation, Jeffers was disturbed by Una’s serious illness in early 1949. Her he...
