The second volume of The Collected Letters of Robinson Jeffers with the Selected Letters of Una Jeffers, Volume 2, edited by James Karman, was published by Stanford University Press in late September. At 1,102 pages, it is even longer than Volume 1 (997 pages). This new volume covers the years of a single decade, 1931 – 1939, during which Jeffers attained his greatest fame in the earlier years, which was followed by exhaustion and creative and marital crises later in the decade. Readers will find a vast store of information on Jeffers’s circle of friends and acquaintances, the development of the friendship with Mabel Dodger Luhan, the crisis in Taos of 1938 (including missing letters that shed considerable light on the affair), family interactions, Jeffers’s reluctant attempts to explain himself to his audience, and much, much more. As valuable as the texts of the letters themselves are the copious and carefully researched annotations by Jim and Paula Karman, which make the volume, like its predecessor, a kind of social history of the decade, through the Jefferses’ eyes. It may be ordered from Stanford University press at: http://www.sup.org/book.cgi?id=21350
