Born in Paris to a wealthy, devout, expatriate Spanish family, the handsome, brilliant, and charismatic linguist, writer, and ethnomusicologist Jaime de Angulo received a Jesuit education. At age eighteen he rebelled and fled to Colorado, where he worked as a cowboy. He then travelled on to South America, pursued silver mining in Honduras, and arrived in San Francisco just in time for the 1906 earthquake.

De Angulo subsequently earned a medical degree from Johns Hopkins University and married Carey Fink, a fellow medical student and future associate of Carl Jung. After working as a genetics researcher at Stanford, de Angulo dismissed medicine as “a pile of junk” and bought a cattle ranch in Modoc County, where he came in contact with California’s Pit River Indians.

The ranch failed in 1915, and de Angulo homesteaded in Big Sur on a ranch where he would live intermittently for much of the rest of his life. In nearby Carmel he met Lucy Shepard Freeland (“Nancy”), a New Jersey native from a wealthy family who would later become his second wife. De Angulo introduced Nancy to linguistics and encouraged her to enroll at U.C. Berkeley, where she became a prized student of Alfred L. Kroeber. The famed anthropologist objected to the “unstable” behavior of Nancy’s lover, who was known to have indulged his passions with both men and women (at times dressed in women’s clothing). Objecting to de Angulo and Nancy living together in her Bernard Maybeck-designed home while de Angulo was still married to Carey Fink, Kroeber blackballed him from Berkeley academia.

The affable de Angulo was friends with Ezra Pound, Carl Jung, D.H. Lawrence, Henry Miller, Harry Parch, Henry Cowell, Robinson Jeffers, and countless other poets, mystics, and scholars. During his lifetime he wrote poetry and fiction about Indians and their myths, published more than a dozen articles, and wrote seventeen grammatical sketches of native languages. When he finally received a linguistics grant, de Angulo commented that the funders “didn’t give a damn about my private morals so long as my phonetics were right.”

Nancy divorced De Angulo in 1943. After an attempted suicide in Berkeley, he moved to San Francisco and lived on income from odd jobs and a small allowance from Nancy. In 1948 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. De Angulo spent his final years with poet Robert Duncan as his typist in the house rebuilt for Nancy after the 1923 Berkeley fire. One year before his death, De Angelo read his fictional handling of California Indian traditional stories, Indian Tales, over local radio station KPFA.