Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, and CIA agent, who was born on May 22, 1927, in New York City to Erard and Elizabeth Matthiessen. He was born into a well-to-do family that lived in New York City and Connecticut, where he and his brother developed a love of animals that would later influence his future work as a wildlife naturalist and writer.

Matthiessen is the author of more than thirty books, and he is the only writer to win the National Book Award for both non-fiction and fiction. He won the National Book Award for Non-fiction in 1979 and 1980 for The Snow Leopard and in 2008 for Fiction for Shadow Country. Matthiessen was a co-founder of The Paris Review, a world-renowned naturalist, explorer, and activist, who passed away in April 2014.

Matthiessen was also a prominent environmental activist, and his non-fiction work featured nature, travel, and American Indian issues and history. He wrote a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case in In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction has been adapted for film, including the early story "Travelin' Man" in The Young One (1960) and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) in the 1991 film of the same name. In 2008, at the age of 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.

Matthiessen was known for his lyrical writing about animals and his moving descriptions of the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea. He was treated for acute leukemia for more than a year, and his death came as he awaited publication of his final novel, In Paradise, on April 8. Matthiessen's life and work continue to inspire and inform those who are passionate about literature, nature, and environmental activism.