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, N