TRUE NATURE: THE PILGRIMAGE OF PETER MATTHIESSEN

— COMING OCTOBER14 —

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.

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.”

– FROM PANTHEON BOOKS –

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ADVANCE PRAISE

“A riveting account of the tumultuous, untamed, yet determinedly focused life of Peter Matthiessen, a writer of planetary greatness. A superb nature writer, an uncompromising social and environmental activist, a devotee of Zen’s endless path toward transformation, and by all accounts a failure as a proper family man, Matthiessen has been gifted with an excellent biographer in Lance Richardson, whose True Nature approaches this life with a Zen-like quality of calm, gratitude, and expansiveness all its own.” — JOY WILLIAMS, winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

“True Nature is a stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen—portraying the man in all his maddening complexities. And what a journey: founding The Paris Review, working undercover for the CIA, Zen master, chasing the snow leopard in the Himalayas. This intimate and gracefully written biography is absolutely enthralling.” — KAI BIRD, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus

In May 2022, Lance Richardson set out across the Himalayas of Nepal with Gavin Anderson, a Scotsman who runs an ethical trekking company called Nomadic Skies, and James Appleton, an English photographer, to retrace the legendary journey described in Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard (1978). Their destination was Shey Gompa, the Crystal Monastery, near the edge of the Tibetan Plateau. (Video © James Appleton)