True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson
This first biography of the only writer to have ever won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction, is appropriately epic, in detail and scope.
To say that Matthiessen (1927–2014) lived an extraordinary life is to put it mildly. A co-founder of The Paris Review, he developed environmental/nature writing in a way that forced it to be taken seriously, and widely read, through books like The Snow Leopard and Wildlife in America. He played an important role in introducing Zen Buddhism to the US, pre-dated Timothy Leary as a pioneer of LSD research, and was at the forefront of myriad social activist causes, including work with Cesar Chavez. He spent decades trying to secure the release of Leonard Pelletier and bringing the plight of Native Americans to a wide audience.
Refusing to let himself be pigeonholed as a nature writer, he returned again and again to fiction, notably in Far Tortuga, At Play in the Fields of the Lord, and the NBA-winning Shadow Country. For someone who would become an ordained Zen priest, and practitioner of zazen (seated meditation), he always seemed to be contradictorily in motion: traveling the world on journalism assignments, for literary research, teaching and speaking engagements and participating in social activism demonstrations. Who else but Peter Matthiessen would turn down an invite to the “Party of the Century” (Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball) because he was too busy?
Journo Lance Richardson provides an unsparing and detailed account that doesn’t dodge Matthiessen’s involvement with the CIA, his three marriages and many affairs, relationships with his children, publishers, editors and agents, the lawsuits that plagued him after publishing In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, his mercurial moods and occasional naivete. A magisterial look at one of the towering figures of 20th century literature.
Adult Non-Fiction pr8018863