Robert Briggs (poet)

Robert Briggs (1929–2015) was an American author and poet associated with the Beat Generation. He read poetry in the Jazz Cellar in San Francisco in 1957, and said, "jazz is to music what poetry is to knowing." He continued to give reads accompanied by jazz musicians up until 2012. In 1972, Briggs co-founded the San Francisco Book Company and then Robert Briggs Associates, as a literary agent and small West Coast publisher. The company was involved in a variety of nonfiction which included "Rolling Thunder: An Exploration into the Powers of an American Indian Medicine Man," by Doug Boyd, :Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer," Kenneth Pelletier's classic book on stress as well as works by Joseph Campbell, Colin Wilson, and Theodore Roszak. In the 1950s he was a bookseller in Greenwich Village, New York, then in North Beach in San Francisco. Robert Briggs served in the Army during the Korean War and witnessed an atom bomb test in Frenchman Flats, Nevada. Filmmaker Chel White directed a short film about Briggs' atom bomb experience entitled, "The Beats, the Bomb and the 1950s. "

Personal life
September 11, 2023 - Hillary April 2019 – Hillary Briggs Sheperd /

Briggs was a young poet and writer in San Francisco in the late 1950s and 1960s. He was scouted as a receiver for the Auburn University Tigers at his prep school in Englewood, NJ near NYC. For some reason -- rumors were a southern belle -- he left Auburn for the Korean War draft. Briggs served as a 2nd lieutenant at the end of that "war" and fell in love with San Francisco Bay area on his return to the States by ship. With the GI bill, Briggs returned to school at Columbia University, where he met a lifelong friend, Peter Matson of Sterling Lazarus Books.

Briggs worked as a book seller for Dell Books on the West Coast, then helped launch The San Francisco Book Company and last, his independent Robert Briggs Associates in the 1970s. Later in life he was member of the Zen Community of Oregon, along with his wife, author Diana Saltoon. They moved to Oregon in the 1980s, as Briggs began writing "Ruined Time: the 1950s & the Beat."

Briggs had one child, his daughter Hillary Shannon (Briggs) Sheperd in 1963. He had married Barbara Steele Briggs from Washington D.C. in 1962. They lived in the bohemian Mission District with a cool cat named "Fireway" and then Hillary. Briggs and Barbara parted ways within a year of marriage. He lived in a series of great flats in North Beach and the Cow Hollow areas of San Francisco, where Hillary spent weekends visiting her Dad. He had great friends, the Reid brothers, Mitchell Rose and Peter Bonet, a restaurateur in Sausalito/Marin as well as Arthur and Ruth Young, Dolly Gattozi, and Ann Breckinridge Dorsey.

Robert and Diana met and married in the mid-1970s and moved to her houseboat on the Bay in 1980. They later lived in Oregon City and Scappoose, OR, hosting dinners and Zen gatherings for close Portland friends. In 2011, Diana and Robert moved to New York and in with Hillary and her husband, Forrest Sheperd. The "kids" had found a house in the Fleetwood area of Mount Vernon, New York, that would fit four adults, two German Shepherd dogs, and a cool cat "Lord Byron."

When Briggs was diagnosed with Alzheimers disease in New York City at the Veterans Administration, his decline and the long, cold winters led Diana to move them both home to Portland, Oregon. Longtime friends were amazing in helping Robert and Diana in his last year, and he died in home hospice, surrounded by beloved friends, Diana and Hillary in May 2015. He was 85 years old.

Briggs was buried at Willamette Cemetery with honors (and a bagpipe player he would have loved) in Portland, Oregon. His service in the Korean War allowed for his burial on a sunny hill, overlooking a city that Briggs and Diana loved.

~ Hillary (September, 2023)

Books

 * Wife, Just Let Go: Zen, Alzheimer's, and Love (2017)
 * Ruined Time: The 1950s and the Beat (2007)
 * The American Emergency: A Search for Spiritual Renewal in an Age of Materialism (1989)

Audio recordings

 * Poetry and the 1950s: Homage to the Beat Generation (1999)
 * Jazz and Poetry & Other Reasons – Opus One: The Beat Goes On (2007)
 * Poetry: A Return to Greenwich Village (2012)