Peter Matthiessen Biography Quotes 7 Report mistakes

Early Life and Education
Peter Matthiessen was born in 1927 and came of age in the northeastern United States, where an early fascination with birds and wild places shaped a lifelong devotion to the natural world. He served in the U.S. Navy near the end of World War II, then attended Yale University. In the years after college he spent time in Europe, laying the groundwork for a literary vocation that would entwine fieldwork, reportage, and fiction. From the beginning, he moved between two callings that would define him: meticulous observation of the living earth and a restless search for spiritual and moral clarity.

Paris and The Paris Review
In the early 1950s Matthiessen joined a circle of young writers in Paris and helped found The Paris Review, working alongside George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, and Thomas Guinzburg. He served as the magazine's first editor and helped shape its celebrated author interviews and international outlook. Years later he acknowledged that he had briefly worked for the CIA during this period, a decision he later regretted. The Paris years gave him a durable literary network and a rigorous editorial sensibility that would inform his own prose for decades.

Naturalist and Novelist
Returning to the United States, Matthiessen began publishing books that braided travel, ethnography, and ecology. Wildlife in America examined the nation's environmental history with a naturalist's eye; The Cloud Forest, Under the Mountain Wall, and The Tree Where Man Was Born revealed his gift for immersing readers in remote landscapes and cultures without romanticizing them. He also wrote ambitious fiction. At Play in the Fields of the Lord confronted cultural collision and belief in the Amazon; Far Tortuga experimented with dialect and form in chronicling Caribbean turtle men at the edge of survival. He contributed frequently to leading magazines and worked with exacting editors, notably during the William Shawn era at The New Yorker, honing an exact, unsentimental style.

Zen Practice and The Snow Leopard
A decades-long commitment to Zen Buddhism became integral to Matthiessen's life and work. After the death of his second wife, Deborah Love, he undertook a 1973 Himalayan expedition with field biologist George B. Schaller, who was studying blue sheep and the elusive snow leopard in Nepal's Dolpo and Mustang regions. The journey, rendered in The Snow Leopard, interwove grief, field notes, and Zen practice into a meditation on impermanence and attention. The book received the National Book Award and brought him a wide readership beyond nature writing. His Zen journals, later collected in Nine-Headed Dragon River, traced the patience and discipline behind that clarity, and he went on to be ordained as a Zen Buddhist priest. His maturation in practice influenced his bearing and his prose: spare, steady, and receptive.

Reporting and Advocacy
Matthiessen's nonfiction often confronted injustice. In Sal Si Puedes he reported on Cesar Chavez and the farmworkers movement, engaging with organizers such as Chavez and Dolores Huerta to capture the moral stakes of their struggle. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse examined the American Indian Movement, the siege at Pine Ridge, and the case of Leonard Peltier, situating headlines within a deeper history of broken treaties and surveillance; the book sparked years of litigation before it returned to print, and Matthiessen's reporting put him in conversation with AIM leaders including Russell Means and Dennis Banks. He also published Indian Country, extending this inquiry across the continent. Closer to home on eastern Long Island, Men's Lives chronicled the baymen of the South Fork as regulations, development, and ecological change threatened a maritime culture he knew firsthand.

The Florida Epic and Literary Recognition
For three decades Matthiessen researched and wrote about the Florida Everglades and the violent mythos of frontier expansion. His Watson trilogy, Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River, and Bone by Bone, reconstructed the life and death of the planter and outlaw E. J. Watson through multiple voices, landscapes, and historical strata. He later distilled and reimagined the trilogy as Shadow Country, a single-volume novel that won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2008. By then Matthiessen had already received the National Book Award for The Snow Leopard, making him one of the few American writers honored in both fiction and nonfiction, and underscoring the unusual range of his achievements.

Later Years and Final Work
Matthiessen lived for many years on the East End of Long Island, continuing to travel and to bear witness. Blue Meridian followed a quest to document great white sharks; later works took him to Antarctica and the world of cranes, extending a career-long attentiveness to species on the brink. His final novel, In Paradise, appeared in 2014 and centered on a meditative retreat at Auschwitz, reflecting retreats initiated by Zen teacher Bernie Glassman and probing the ethical complexities of memory, guilt, and compassion. The book's stark tone and uneasy humor showed a writer still testing the boundaries of spiritual inquiry and narrative form late in life.

Family and Community
The relationships around Matthiessen were inseparable from his work. His first marriage, to the writer and translator Patsy Southgate, unfolded during the formative Paris years. His second marriage, to Deborah Love, shaped the grief and searching at the core of The Snow Leopard. He later remarried and sustained a family life on Long Island while remaining an active presence in local environmental causes. His children included the environmental advocate Alex Matthiessen, whose work with river conservation echoed the currents of responsibility that run through his father's books. Among colleagues and friends, George Plimpton remained an enduring link to The Paris Review's founding circle; George Schaller stood as a scientific counterpart in the field; and Bernie Glassman became a significant spiritual interlocutor as Matthiessen's Zen practice matured.

Legacy
Peter Matthiessen died in 2014, leaving a body of work that bridged literature, reportage, and the ethics of attention. He demonstrated that the writer's craft could be both exacting and humane, capable of encompassing a Nepalese pass shrouded in cloud, a flooded glade of the Ten Thousand Islands, or a union hall in California's Central Valley with the same unsparing clarity. His books remain a record of encounters, with cultures, animals, and histories, conducted in humility. They continue to influence novelists, nature writers, and investigative reporters, and they honor the people who shaped his path: editors and field scientists, activists and fishermen, fellow Zen practitioners, and the family and friends who bore witness as he wrestled the world into luminous prose.

Our collection contains 7 quotes who is written by Peter, under the main topics: Writing - Human Rights - Work - Journey.