Peter Matthiessen Biography

American novelist and travel writer, born in New York City, educated at Yale University. In 1953 he was co-founder of the Paris Review. His early novels Race Rock (1954), Partisans (1955), and Raditzer (1961) have in common the theme of the disjunctions between thought and action. Wildlife in America (1959) initiated his career as a writer on natural history and travel. His many expeditions to remote areas of the world are described in a succession of books which include The Cloud Forest (1961), on the South American wilderness and its inhabitants; The Snow Leopard (1978), an account of an arduous trek in the Himalayas; and Baikal, Sacred Sea of Siberia (1992). The concern evident in such work over technology's threats to the natural order informs his later fiction. At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), his most highly regarded novel, deals with the effects on an Amazonian tribe of a group of American missionaries. Far Tortuga (1975), an experimental montage of dialogue, description, and folk-tales, depicts the lives of Caribbean fishermen. Killing Mr Watson (1990) is a partly fictional account of the killer of Belle Starr, the outlaw. Matthiessen's other works include In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983), which investigates an incident of armed conflict between Native Americans and the FBI in 1975.