Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen's nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978) and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction was adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name. In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume, 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that had been published in the 1990s. According to critic Michael Dirda, "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea." Matthiessen was treated for acute leukemia for more than a year. He died on April 5, 2014, three days before publication of his final book, the novel In Paradise on April 8.

Peter Matthiessen studied at Yale University, Hotchkiss School and St. Bernard's School. The recorded working language is English. Works named in the authority record are The Snow Leopard. Distinctions recorded are John Burroughs Medal, Helmerich Award, Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction and William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Matthiessen was born in New York City to Erard Adolph Matthiessen (1902–2000) and Elizabeth (née Carey). Erard, an architect, joined the Navy during World War II and helped design gunnery training devices. Later, he gave up architecture to become a spokesman and fund-raiser for the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy. The well-to-do family lived in both New York City and Connecticut where, along with his brother, Matthiessen developed a love of animals that influenced his future work as a wildlife writer and naturalist. He attended St. Bernard's School, the Hotchkiss School, and — after briefly serving in the U.S. Navy (1945–47) – Yale University (B.A., 1950), with his junior year spent at the Sorbonne. At Yale, he majored in English, published short stories (one of which won the prestigious Atlantic Prize), and studied zoology.

Marrying and resolving to undertake a writer's career, he soon moved back to Paris, where he associated with other expatriate American writers such as William Styron, James Baldwin and Irwin Shaw. There, in 1953, he became one of the founders, along with Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg, Donald Hall, Ben Morreale, and George Plimpton, of the renowned literary magazine The Paris Review. As revealed in a 2006 film, he was working for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) at the time, using the Review as his cover. In a 2008 interview with Charlie Rose, Matthiessen stated that he "invented The Paris Review as cover" for his CIA activities. He completed his novel Partisans while employed by the CIA. He returned to the U.S. in 1954, leaving Plimpton (a childhood friend) in charge of the Review. Matthiessen divorced in 1956 and began traveling extensively.

Shortly after the 1983 publication of In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen and his publisher Viking Penguin were sued for libel by David Price, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, and William J. Janklow, the former South Dakota governor. The plaintiffs sought over $49 million in damages; Janklow also sued to have all copies of the book withdrawn from bookstores. After four years of litigation, Federal District Court Judge Diana E. Murphy dismissed Price's lawsuit, upholding Matthiessen's "freedom to develop a thesis, conduct research in an effort to support the thesis, and to publish an entirely one-sided view of people and events." In the Janklow case, a South Dakota court also ruled for Matthiessen. Both cases were appealed. In 1990, the Supreme Court refused to hear Price's arguments, effectively ending his appeal. The South Dakota Supreme Court dismissed Janklow's case the same year. With the lawsuits concluded, the paperback edition of the book was finally published in 1992.

After graduating from Yale in 1950, Matthiessen became engaged to Patsy Southgate, a Smith graduate whose father had been the chief of protocol in Roosevelt's White House. Matthiessen and Southgate had two children together. They divorced in 1956. In 1963 he married the writer Deborah Love. They lived in Sagaponack, NY. He adopted her daughter, writer Rue Matthiessen. In 1964, Alex Matthiessen, an environmentalist, was born. In his book The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reported having had a somewhat tempestuous on-again off-again relationship with his wife Deborah, culminating in a deep commitment to each other made shortly before she was diagnosed with cancer. Matthiessen and Deborah practiced Zen Buddhism. She died in New York City in January 1972. In September of the following year came the field trip to Himalayan Nepal. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga, receiving dharma transmission from Bernard Glassman in 1984. He gave dharma transmission to three students: Sensei Madeline Ko-I Bastis, Sensei Michel Engu Dobbs, and Sensei Dorothy Dai-En Friedman. Before practicing Zen, Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. He said his Buddhism evolved fairly naturally from his drug experiences. He argued that it was unfortunate that LSD had become outlawed over time, given its potentially beneficial effects as a spiritual and therapeutic tool (when administered with the right care and attention) and was critical of a figure such as Timothy Leary in terms of the long-term reputation of the drug. In 1980, Matthiessen married Maria Eckhart, born in Tanzania, in a Zen ceremony on Long Island, New York. They lived in Sagaponack, New York. Eckhart is the mother of Serial host and Executive Producer Sarah Koenig, who was 10 or 11 years old at the time of the marriage. In 1989, Matthiessen published an autobiographical essay wherein he traced his ancestry to North Frisian shipmaster and whaling captain Matthias Petersen (1632–1706).

Matthiessen was diagnosed with leukemia in late 2012. He died at his home in Sagaponack on April 5, 2014, aged 86.

• Race Rock (1954) • Partisans (1955) • Raditzer (1961) • At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) • Far Tortuga (1975) • Midnight Turning Gray: Short Stories (1984) • On the River Styx and Other Stories (1989) • The Watson trilogy • Killing Mister Watson (1990) • Lost Man's River (1997) • Bone by Bone (1999) • Shadow Country: a new rendering of the Watson legend (2008) • In Paradise (2014)

• Wildlife in America (1959) • The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961) • Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962) • "The Atlantic Coast", a chapter in The American Heritage Book of Natural Wonders (1963) • The Shorebirds of North America (1967) • Oomingmak: The Expedition to the Musk Ox Island in the Bering Sea (1967) • Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (1969) • Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark (1971). • The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972) • The Snow Leopard (1978) • Sand Rivers, with photographer Hugo van Lawick. Aurum Press, London 1981,. • In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). • Indian Country (1984). • Nine-headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969–1982 (1986). • Men's Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork (1986). • African Silences (1991). • Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia (1992). • East of Lo Monthang: In the Land of Mustang (1995). • The Peter Matthiessen Reader: Nonfiction, 1959–1961 (2000). • Tigers in the Snow (2000). • The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes (2001). • End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica (2003).

• Title — Publication — Collected in • "Sadie" — The Atlantic (January 1951) — Midnight Turning Gray On the River Styx • "The Fifth Day" — The Atlantic (September 1951) • "The Tower of the Four Winds" — The Cornhill Magazine (Summer 1952) — - • "Martin's Beach" — Botteghe Oscure (1952) — - • "A Replacement" — The Paris Review 1 (Spring 1953) — Midnight Turning Gray • "Late in the Season" — New World Writing 3 (May 1953) — Midnight Turning Gray On the River Styx • "Lina" — The Cornhill Magazine (Autumn 1956) — - • "Travelin Man" — Harper's (February 1957) — Midnight Turning Gray On the River Styx • "The Wolves of Aguila" — Harper's Bazaar (August 1958) • "Midnight Turning Gray" — The Saturday Evening Post (September 28, 1963) • "Horse Latitudes" aka "Horace and Hassid" — Venture: The Traveler's World (October 1964) — On the River Styx • "On the River Styx" — Esquire (August 1985) • "Lumumba Lives" — Wigwag (Summer 1988) • "The Centerpiece" — On the River Styx and Other Stories (1989) • "Speck in the Glades" — Esquire (July 1993) — from Shadow Country