Happy Birthday, Peter Matthiessen

Born May 22, 1927, New York NY | Died April 5, 2014, Sagaponack, NY

Today, the Best American Essays newsletter celebrates author, naturalist, and activist Peter Matthiessen on the ninety-eighth anniversary of his birth. The author of more than thirty books and a founder of The Paris Review, he is one of the few American writers to win a National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction.

Subscribe to our newsletter for news about upcoming online conversations with Best American Essays contributors about essayists.

Peter Matthiessen, from “The Art of Fiction No. 157,” The Paris Review, 1999.

“Many great writers inspired me, of course, but inspiration is not the same as a direct influence. I was often stirred by the beauty of great prose, the passion and startling intensity of hard-won truths, which leapt from that creative fire. […] For the writer, therefore the reader, fresh truth is exhilarating, even painful truth.”

Peter Matthiessen, 1991.

“Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.”

The Snow Leopard (1978) garnered a National Book Award in Nonfiction; In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1982) examines “the ruthless persecution of Leonard Peltier,” which, Matthiessen writes, “had less to do with his own actions than with underlying issues of history, racism, and economics, in particular, Indian sovereignty claims and growing opposition to massive energy development on treaty lands and dwindling reservations.” The novel Shadow Country (2008) earned Matthiessen his a National Book Award in Fiction.

First published work of nonfiction:

• Wildlife in America, Viking Press, 1959.

Select nonfiction bibliography:

• The Peter Matthiessen Reader, Vintage, 2000.

Essays by Peter Matthiessen listed in Notables (N) in The Best American Essays (BAE):

• “The Cranes of Hokkaido,” Audubon, 1995 (BAE 1996, N).

• “At the End of Tibet,” Audubon, 1994 (BAE 1995, N).

• “Alighting Upon the Daurian Steppe,” Harper’s Magazine, 1993 (BAE 1994, N).

• “The Case for Burning,” New York Times Magazine, 1988 (BAE 1989; N).

See also:

Watch Author’s Reflections—Conversations from Penn State, 2010.

Watch Peter Matthiessen Reflects on a Life in Words, PBS, 2010.

Visit the Peter Matthiessen Papers at the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas, Austin.

Read this biographical remembrance of Matthiessen’s early years, “A Writer’s Controversial Past That Will Not Die,” The New York Times, 2018.

Read this remembrance of Matthiessen’s work, “Force of Nature,” Jeff Wheelwright, The American Scholar, 2018.

Read this interview with Alec Michod, “Living on the Edge of Life: A Final Interview with Peter Matthiessen,” Los Angeles Review of Books, 2014.

Read this interview with Ron Rosenbaum, “Peter Matthiessen’s Lifelong Quest for Peace,” Smithsonian Magazine, 2014.

Read this interview with Howard Norman, “Peter Matthiessen: The Art of Fiction No. 157,” The Paris Review, 1999.