Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, explorer, and Zen teacher. He had great success in fiction and nonfiction, often writing about environmental themes and concerns. His works on spiritual insights about nature, travel, and the fragility of the human condition, turned him into a New Age guru.
Born into a wealthy family in New York City, Matthiessen served in the U.S. Navy 1945–47 and studied at Yale. He had his first short story published in the Atlantic Monthly when he was still a student at Yale-recruited by the CIA while at Yale, he briefly served as a covert agent in France. There, he co-founded The Paris Review literary magazine to cover his spying.
After quitting the agency, Matthiessen turned to journalism, writing a series of reports on endangered species for Sports Illustrated, which became the basis for Wildlife in America (1959.) The book’s success allowed Matthiessen to venture farther afield. He trekked through South America for his book The Cloud Forest (1961; serialized in The New Yorker) and hiked the Himalayas writing The Snow Leopard (1978; National Book Award.)
Matthiessen’s travels also fueled his writing of novels. His At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) established him as a prominent novelist. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) delved into the history of the Sioux nation and its relationship with the U.S.
Matthiessen became the first writer to have won the National Book Award in fiction and nonfiction with his novel Shadow Country (2008,) about a Florida plantation owner.
Buddhism became Matthiessen’s primary focal point for the last 40 years of his life. He eventually became a Zen monk and established a Buddhist retreat center at his home on Long Island, New York.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Peter Matthiessen
The concept of conservation is a far truer sign of civilization than that spoilation of a continent which we once confused with progress.
—Peter Matthiessen
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions — such as merit, such as past, present, and future — our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
—Peter Matthiessen
The insights and epigrams of Alexander Pope weren’t clich