About this item

California, with its scores of native languages, contains a wealth of old time stories - a bedrock literature of North America. Jaime de Angulo's linguistic and ethnographic work, his writings, as well as the legends that cloak the Old Coyote himself, vividly reflect the particulars of the Pacific coast. Born in Paris of Spanish descent, he came to America to become a cowboy, and he did - as well as a doctor, a linguist, ethnomusicologist, and writer. His poetry and prose uniquely represented the bohemian sensibility of the twenties, thirties and forties, and he was known for his reworkings of coyote tales and shamanic mysticism. So vivid was his writing that Ezra Pound called him "the American Ovid," and William Carlos Williams claimed that de Angulo was "one of the most outstanding writers I have ever encountered.



About the Author

Andrew Schelling

Andrew Schelling grew up in New England - Thoreau & Transcendentalist country - then moved West to California, where he worked among poets of the San Francisco Bay Area, editing a samizdat literary journal and studying Sanskrit and Zen Buddhism. In 1990 he resettled in Colorado, along the Front Range of the Southern Rockies. He is a poet, translator, essay writer, and editor. Dropping the Bow: Poems from Ancient India received the Academy of American Poets award for translation in 1992. A recent book, Tracks Along the Left Coast: Jaime de Angulo & Pacific Coast Culture, investigates wilderness encounters, bohemian writers, and mythology of the west. His most recent book is Some Unquenchable Desire: Sanskrit Poems of the Buddhist Hermit Bhartrihari. Natural history, linguistics, and thorny old languages run through his twenty-odd books. He teaches at Naropa University.



Read Next Recommendation

Report incorrect product information.