True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen

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

＂A stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen.＂ --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus

＂A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative.＂ --Pico Iyer, Air Mail

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 a 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.＂

LANCE RICHARDSON is a writer living in Providence, Rhode Island. His first book, House of NutterThe Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and spotlighted on ＂The New Yorker Recommends.＂ It was also named one of the notable books of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded a research fellowship at the Harry Ransom Center and residencies at MacDowell, Yaddo, and the Key West Literary Seminar and was named the 2023-24 Janice B. and Milford D. Gerton/Arts and Letters Foundation Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. Lance holds a masters degree in longform journalism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU. He teaches in the MFA in Writing at Bennington College, Vermont.