True Nature : The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen

The first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the larger-than-life writer whose pioneering work helped create the environmental movement and centered social advocacy for workers'' and Native American rights, by the award-winning cultural historian Lance Richardson.

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a giant literary figure of his time, was a person of myriad contradictions. Ambivalent about his WASP privilege -- as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the Social Register -- he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, working for the CIA and founding The Paris Review with George Plimpton. He made his living as a fisherman on Long Island while becoming a writer, whose early fiction (garnering him invitations to drinks with top New York editors) soon existed alongside such works as Wildlife in America (1959), a blockbuster of "environmental writing," before that movement and category even existed (with its damning of white colonizers, too, before that was the norm). His pursuit of spiritual understandings took him to far-flung horizons, from his famous "Snow Leopard" journey in the Himalayas to his travels with biologists in the Serengeti, his canoeing through rapids in the Amazon in search of a Miocene-epoch fossil, his embedding with the Hadza people in Tanzania, and his lifelong battle to get justice for the wrongly accused Native American prisoner Leonard Peltier. Meanwhile, this champion of other people''s rights was a philanderer and an inattentive father at home; he was an ever unsatisfied seeker, yet a devoted practitioner and teacher of Zen.

The life is given page-turning immediacy by Lance Richardson, who draws on rich primary sources and interviews with people close to Matthiessen to reveal the ways that the writer''s uncanny gifts allowed him to discover deeper connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation—to express in dual genres, presciently and eloquently, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge."

The first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native Americans rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement, by award-winning writer Lance Richardson.

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York Social Register he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions: floating through the Amazon to recover a prehistorical fossil; embedding with an uncontacted tribe in Netherlands New Guinea; swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. His novels, inspired by his travels, were unclassifiable meditations about Caymanian turtle hunters and frontier outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his nonfiction became legendary: nature books like Wildlife in America ?key parts of the canon of emergent environmental writing,? says Bill McKibben as well as advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, and Native American land claims.

Underlying all Matthiessen's disparate pursuits was the same existential search to find a cure for ?deep restlessness.? This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, Lance Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen's life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer's uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation to express, eloquently and presciently, that ?in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge.?