True Nature

The first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the larger-than-life writer whose pioneering work helped create the environmental movement and centered social advocacy for workers'' and Native American rights, by the award-winning cultural historian Lance Richardson.

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a giant literary figure of his time, was a person of myriad contradictions. Ambivalent about his WASP privilege -- as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the Social Register -- he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, working for the CIA and founding The Paris Review with George Plimpton. He made his living as a fisherman on Long Island while becoming a writer, whose early fiction (garnering him invitations to drinks with top New York editors) soon existed alongside such works as Wildlife in America (1959), a blockbuster of "environmental writing," before that movement and category even existed (with its damning of white colonizers, too, before that was the norm). His pursuit of spiritual understandings took him to far-flung horizons, from his famous "Snow Leopard" journey in the Himalayas to his travels with biologists in the Serengeti, his canoeing through rapids in the Amazon in search of a Miocene-epoch fossil, his embedding with the Hadza people in Tanzania, and his lifelong battle to get justice for the wrongly accused Native American prisoner Leonard Peltier. Meanwhile, this champion of other people''s rights was a philanderer and an inattentive father at home; he was an ever unsatisfied seeker, yet a devoted practitioner and teacher of Zen.

The life is given page-turning immediacy by Lance Richardson, who draws on rich primary sources and interviews with people close to Matthiessen to reveal the ways that the writer''s uncanny gifts allowed him to discover deeper connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation—to express in dual genres, presciently and eloquently, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge."