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Peter Matthiessen |
Peter Matthiessen (born May 22, 1927, in New York City) is an American novelist and nonfiction writer and an environmental activist. Matthiessen's work is known for its meticulous approach to research. He frequently focuses on American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. In November 2008, at age 81, he received the National Book Award for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of a trilogy of novels he released in the 1990s.
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Along with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and Donald Hall, Matthiessen founded the literary magazine The The Paris Review in 1953. At the time he was a young recruit for the CIA.1
In 1965, Matthiessen wrote a novel about a group of American missionaries and a South American tribe. The book was later made into a major Hollywood film with the same title, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, in 1991. In 1979, Matthiessen's nonfiction book The Snow Leopard won the Contemporary Thought category of the National Book Award. His work on oceanographic research, "Blue Meridian," with photographer Peter A. Lake, documented the making of the film "Blue Water, White Death," which was directed by Peter Gimbel and Jim Lipscomb. This is widely considered to have inspired Peter Benchley to write Jaws in 1974.citation needed Matthiessen has been the official State Author of New York, 1995-1997.
In 2008, Matthiessen's fiction trilogy Killing Mr. Watson, Lost Man's River and Bone by Bone, based on accounts of Florida planter Edgar J. Watson's death shortly after the Southwest Florida Hurricane of 1910, was reformatted into a single volume entitled The Shadow Country. The book won the 2008 National Book Award, much to the contention of many fans, who prefer the trilogy to the single volume version, which is 400 pages shorter.2
Shortly after the 1983 publication of In The Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen and his publisher Viking Penguin were sued for libel by FBI agent David Price and former South Dakota governor William J. Janklow. The plaintiffs sought over $49 million in damages; Janklow also successfully sued to have all copies of the book withdrawn from bookstores.3 After four years of litigation, Federal District Court Judge Diana E. Murphy dismissed Price's lawsuit, upholding Matthiessen's right "to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."4 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.5 6 With the lawsuits settled, the paperback edition of the book was finally published in 1992.
In his book The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reports having 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. She died in New York City near the end of 1972. She and Matthiessen had four children; the youngest of them, Alex Matthiessen, was 7 or 8 years old at the time of her death. In September of the following year, Matthiessen went on an expedition to the Himalayas with field biologist George Schaller.
Matthiessen and Deborah practiced Zen Buddhism. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga.citation needed He lives in Sagaponack, New York.
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