Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen
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Name	Peter Matthiessen
Caption	Matthiessen in 2011
Birth date	22 May 1927
Birth place	New York City, New York, U.S.
Death date	5 April 2014
Death place	Sagaponack, New York, U.S.
Occupation	Novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer
Nationality	American
Education	Yale University, The Sorbonne
Notableworks	The Snow Leopard, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Shadow Country
Awards	National Book Award (twice), William Dean Howells Medal

Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, and wilderness writer renowned for his fiction and non-fiction works exploring nature, indigenous cultures, and spiritual quests. A co-founder of the influential literary magazine The Paris Review, his writing career spanned over six decades and was deeply intertwined with his environmental activism and practice of Zen Buddhism. He is the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and non-fiction categories, celebrated for masterworks like The Snow Leopard and the epic trilogy Shadow Country.

Biography

Born in Manhattan to a prosperous family, he attended the St. Bernard's School and later the Hotchkiss School before serving in the United States Navy at the end of World War II. He studied at Yale University, where his literary interests flourished, and spent time at The Sorbonne in Paris. In 1953, with Harold L. Humes and George Plimpton, he established The Paris Review, a publication that became a cornerstone of post-war American literature. His personal life included marriages to Patsy Southgate and later Maria Eckhart, and he was a longtime resident of Sagaponack on Long Island. A dedicated practitioner, he studied under Zen masters including Eido Tai Shimano and received ordination as a Zen priest in 1991.

Literary career

Matthiessen's literary output is distinguished by its fusion of rigorous natural observation, deep cultural inquiry, and narrative power. His early novels, such as Race Rock and Partisans, explored social and political themes, while At Play in the Fields of the Lord, set in the Amazon rainforest, examined clashes between missionaries, indigenous peoples, and mercenaries. His non-fiction established him as a preeminent voice in nature writing, with works like The Tree Where Man Was Born, documenting East African ecosystems, and The Snow Leopard, a spiritual and natural history chronicle of a trek to Nepal's remote Dolpo region that won the 1979 National Book Award. His monumental trilogy on the American frontier, culminating in the revised single volume Shadow Country, won the 2008 National Book Award for Fiction and the William Dean Howells Medal.

Environmental activism

His writing was inextricably linked to a lifelong commitment to environmental and social justice. He was a founding board member of the Natural Resources Defense Council and actively supported the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. His investigative works often exposed ecological threats and cultural destruction, such as Wildlife in America, an early conservation history, and Indian Country, which detailed struggles over land and treaty rights. He reported on the controversial American Indian Movement occupation at Wounded Knee and was a vocal critic of industrial pollution, corporate farming, and unsustainable development, advocating for the preservation of wilderness from the Florida Everglades to the Himalayas.

Awards and honors

Throughout his career, Matthiessen received numerous prestigious accolades recognizing his literary and environmental contributions. He is one of the few authors to win the National Book Award in two distinct categories, for The Snow Leopard (General Non-Fiction, 1979) and Shadow Country (Fiction, 2008). Other significant honors include the John Burroughs Medal for nature writing, the Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities, and the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. His work was also recognized with awards from the Academy of Arts and Letters and the Lannan Foundation.

Legacy

Peter Matthiessen's legacy endures as that of a singular writer who seamlessly blended the genres of novel, travelogue, natural history, and spiritual autobiography. He elevated nature writing to a form of profound philosophical and environmental inquiry, influencing generations of authors, environmentalists, and readers. His deep engagement with Zen Buddhism and indigenous worldviews offered a counterpoint to Western materialism, emphasizing interconnection and reverence for the natural world. Institutions like the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies and the Orion Magazine community continue to draw inspiration from his body of work, which remains a vital testament to the power of literature to illuminate and protect the fragile beauty of the planet.

Category:American novelists Category:American nature writers Category:National Book Award winners Category:1927 births Category:2014 deaths