Robert Briggs attended Auburn and Columbia Universities and served in the U.S. Army during the Korean War. He became a partner in The San Francisco Book Company in 1972 and in 1973 founded Robert Briggs Associates, a group of West Coast consultants to writers and small publishers. The Association was involved in a variety of nonfiction publications including Rolling Thunder by Doug Boyd, Mind as Healer, Mind as Slayer, Kenneth R. Pelletier's classic book on stress, as well as works by Joseph Campbell, Stanislav Grof, Colin Wilson, and Theodore Roszak. Briggs is also the author of The American Emergency: A Search for Spiritual Renewal in an Age of Materialism, 1986, and Ruined Time: the 1950s and the Beat, 2006. Ruined Time is a cultural autobiography of the Great Depression, World War II and the 1950s.

This book sparked various multimedia projects including Jazz and Poetry & Other Reasons, reads written and read by Robert Briggs and accompanied by jazz musicians in performances in Portland, OR. CDs were produced that include Poetry in the 1950s (1999), Someone Said No (2003), My Own Atom Bomb (2005), The Beat Goes On (2008), Love in America (2009) and The Beat Revealed (2011). Robert Briggs was involved in early West Coast jazz and poetry scenes where he performed in San Francisco's Jazz Cellar. To Briggs, "Jazz is to music, what poetry is to knowing.".