William Oliver Everson was born in Sacramento, California, and grew up in the San Joaquin Valley, in the town of Selma. His father, an immigrant Norwegian bandmaster and printer, was agnostic; his mother, Christian Scientist. Everson grew to manhood influenced by both, committed to neither. In 1931 and again in 1934-1935, he attended Fresno State College, spending the intervening years as a cannery worker and a laborer for the Civilian Conservation Corps. During his second term at Fresno State College, he encountered the poetry of Robinson Jeffers and, through that encounter, discovered his own vocation as a poet. As he describes it: "I became a pantheist and a poet. At the same instant." He dropped out of college "to go back to the land and become a poet in my own right, to plant a vineyard, commune with nature, and marry my high school sweetheart." In 1943, after the outbreak...