Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen
Matthiessen at WNYC New York Public Radio in 2008 promoting his novel Shadow Country
Born	May 22, 1927(1927-05-22) New York City, New York
Occupation	Writer
Language	English
Nationality	American
Period	1950 – present
Genres	Nature writing, Travel writing, History, Novels
Notable work(s)	The Snow Leopard Shadow Country

Peter Matthiessen (born May 22, 1927, in New York City) is a three-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist. His nonfiction has featured nature and travel, as in The Snow Leopard (1978). Or American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His story "Travelin' Man" was adapted by Luis Buñuel as the film The Young One (1960).

Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction in November 2008, at age 81, for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of three novels set in frontier Florida that were published in the 1990s. For The Snow Leopard he won the 1979 Award in category Contemporary Thought and the 1980 Award in category Nonfiction (paperback).

Career

Along with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and Donald Hall, in 1953 Matthiessen founded the literary magazine The Paris Review. At the time he was working for the CIA.

In 1959, Mathiessen published the first edition of Wildlife in America, a history of the extinction and endangerment of animal and bird species as a consequence of human settlement, throughout North American history, and of the human effort to protect endangered species. It was one of the first books to call attention to climate change (then called global warming), by mentioning that polar ice cap formation caused the lowering of the seas, and that the isthmus Mongoloid people crossed from Asia to present-day Alaska (North America's first human immigration) is now submerged by the Bering Strait.

In 1965, Matthiessen published At Play in the Fields of the Lord, a novel about a group of American missionaries and their encounter with a South American indigenous tribe. The book was adapted into the film of the same name in 1991. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

His work on oceanographic research, Blue Meridian, with photographer Peter A. Lake, documented the making of the film Blue Water, White Death (1971), directed by Peter Gimbel and Jim Lipscomb. It was thought to have inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws in 1974.^{[citation needed]}

Late in 1973 Matthiessen joined field biologist George Schaller on an expedition in the Himalaya Mountains, which was the basis for The Snow Leopard (1978), his double-award-winner.

Interested in the Wounded Knee Incident and the 1976 trial and conviction of Leonard Peltier, an American Indian Movement activist, Mathiessen wrote a non-fiction account, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983).

In 2008, Matthiessen revisited his trilogy of Florida novels published during the 1990s: Killing Mr. Watson (1990), Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone by Bone (1999), inspired by the frontier years of South Florida and the death of plantation owner Edgar J. Watson shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910. He revised and edited the three books, which had originated as one 1,500-page manuscript, which now yielded the single-volume Shadow Country, his latest award-winner.

Crazy Horse lawsuits

Shortly after the 1983 publication of In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen and his publisher Viking Penguin were sued for libel by David Price, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent, and William J. Janklow, the former South Dakota governor. The plaintiffs sought over $49 million in damages; Janklow also sued to have all copies of the book withdrawn from bookstores. After four years of litigation, Federal District Court Judge Diana E. Murphy dismissed Price's lawsuit, upholding Matthiessen's right "to publish an entirely one-sided view of people and events." In the Janklow case, a South Dakota court also ruled for Matthiessen. Both cases were appealed. In 1990, the Supreme Court refused to hear Price's arguments, effectively ending his appeal. The South Dakota Supreme Court dismissed Janklow's case the same year. With the lawsuits settled, the paperback edition of the book was finally published in 1992.

Personal life

In his book The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reports having had a somewhat tempestuous on-again off-again relationship with his wife Deborah, culminating in a deep commitment to each other made shortly before she was diagnosed with cancer. Matthiessen and Deborah had practiced Zen Buddhism. She died in New York City near the end of 1972. They had four children together; the youngest, Alex Matthiessen, was seven or eight years old at the time of her death.

In September of the following year came the field trip to Himalayan Nepal (above). Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga. Before practicing Zen, Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. He says his Buddhism evolved fairly naturally from his drug experiences.

In 1980, Matthiessen married Maria Eckhart, born in Tanzania, in a Zen ceremony on Long Island, New York. They live in Sagaponack, New York.

In 2005, Matthiessen, along with Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin, was hailed in The Land's Wild Music by Mark Tredinnick, which analyzed how the landscape nourished and developed Matthiessen's writing.

Awards

• 1979 National Book Award, Contemporary Thought, for The Snow Leopard
• 1980 National Book Award, General Non-Fiction (paperback), for The Snow Leopard
• 1993 Helmerich Award, the Peggy V. Helmerich Distinguished Author Award is presented annually by the Tulsa Library Trust.
• 1995-1997, designated the State Author of New York
• The 6th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities (2000)
• 2008 National Book Award, Fiction, for Shadow Country
• 2010 Spiros Vergos Prize for Freedom of Expression

Works

Fiction

• Race Rock (1954)
• Partisans (1955)
• Raditzer (1961)
• At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965)
• Far Tortuga (1975)
• On the River Styx and Other Stories (1989)
• The Watson trilogy
  • Killing Mister Watson (1990)
  • Lost Man's River (1997)
  • Bone by Bone (1999)
• Shadow Country: a new rendering of the Watson legend (2008)

Nonfiction

• Wildlife in America (1959)
• The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness (1961)
• Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age (1962)
• "The Atlantic Coast", a chapter in The American Heritage Book of Natural Wonders (1963)
• The Shorebirds of North America (1967)
• Oomingmak (1967)
• Sal Si Puedes: Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution (1969)
• Blue Meridian. The Search for the Great White Shark (1971).
• The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972)
• The Snow Leopard (1978)
• Sand Rivers (1981)
• In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) ISBN 0-14-014456-0
• Indian Country (1984)
• Nine-headed Dragon River: Zen Journals 1969-1982 (1986)
• Men's Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork (1986)
• African Silences(1991)
• Baikal: Sacred Sea of Siberia (1992)
• East of Lo Monthang: In the Land of the Mustang (1995)
• The Peter Matthiessen Reader: Nonfiction, 1959-1961 (2000)
• Tigers in the Snow (2000)
• The Birds of Heaven: Travels With Cranes (2001)
• End of the Earth: Voyage to Antarctica (2003)

External links

• Peter Matthiessen interviewed on Conversations from Penn State
• Howard Norman (Spring 1999). "Peter Matthiessen, The Art of Fiction No. 157". The Paris Review. http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/985/the-art-of-fiction-no-157-peter-matthiessen. 
• Charles McGrath (Nov. 11, 2008). "Are 3 Novels, Revised as One, a New Book?". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/12/books/12matthiessen.html?ref=arts. 
• "Audio file: Peter Matthiessen discussing and reading from his novel Shadow Country", Wind Mountain, November 2008