Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen has devoted his life to two passions, travel and writing, each

informing the other. In more than 20 books-novels, short fiction, and nonfiction-he

has exquisitely described his adventures with vanishing cultures, encounters with

exotic wildlife, and treks through remote landscapes.

Shortly after the publication of his first novel, Race Rock, in 1954, Matthiessen co-

founded the The Paris Review, one of the nation's great literary journals, and was its

first fiction editor. Since then, Matthiessen has published seven novels, including

At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award,

the innovative Far Tortuga, and his stunning trilogy, Killing Mister Watson, Lost

Man's River, and Bone by Bone, which Joseph Heller called "a superb novel, one that

succeeds dramatically on every level. I read it in great gulps."

His book, The Snow Leopard, a nonfiction work, received the National Book Award

in 1978. In bittersweet remembrance following the death of his wife, Matthiessen

confronts the beauty, mysteries, and harshness of the Himalayas and his own equally

strange and difficult feelings about life and death. W.S. Merwin called The Snow

Leopard "a beautiful, magnificent book that gives off at once the resonance of a

classic."

A selection of his nonfiction books gives a sense of the scope of Matthiessen's

work, including: The Tree Where Man Was Born, a National Book Award nominee,

about East Africa; Wildlife in America, still in print after 45 years and considered a

classic environmental work; The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American

Wilderness; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse and Indian Country; Nine-Headed Dragon

River: Zen Journals 1969-1982; Men's Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South

Fork, an elegy for the deteriorating conditions of the fishing industry in eastern Long

Island; and The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes.

According to The New York Times, "Mr. Matthiessen has three indispensable

qualities for an all-around writer: a sense of style, a sense of humor, and an

ungovernable curiosity." The Chicago Tribune calls him "a national treasure," and

William Styron writes, "Peter Matthiessen has created a unique body of work.

It is the work of a man in ecstatic contemplation of our beautiful and inexplicable

planet." Matthiessen and his wife live in Sagaponack, New York.