L A N C E
R I C H A R D S O N
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 / CHATTO & WINDUS –
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ADVANCE PRAISE
“True Nature is a magnificent achievement: an immense work of scholarship, synthesis and empathy, written throughout with verve and lucidity, which illuminates one of the most fascinating writerly lives of the past century.” — ROBERT MACFARLANE, New York Times bestselling author of Is a River Alive?
“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
“Naturalist, novelist, Yeti-hunter, CIA agent—Peter Matthiessen led an exceptional life, and Lance Richardson does a wonderful job capturing it in all its complexity. True Nature is generous and sensitive, but at the same time clear-eyed about its outsized subject.” — ELIZABETH KOLBERT, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction
“True Nature is a stunning achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen. And what a journey: founding The Paris Review, working undercover for the CIA, Zen master, chasing the snow leopard in the Himalayas. This gracefully written biography is absolutely enthralling.” — KAI BIRD, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
“Brooding, sexy, troubled Peter Matthiessen, one of the last great WASP renegades, has had the immense posthumous luck of finding an ideal biographer in Lance Richardson, who patiently and artfully dissects a body of work that evades easy description. Matthiessen emerges from this book as an unexpected radical, an underappreciated Modernist, and a pioneering environmentalist.” — BENJAMIN MOSER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag: Her Life and Work
“Lance Richardson brilliantly captures Peter Matthiessen’s 'pathological restlessness' in this riveting tale of a legendary life. Richardson creates an extraordinary portrait of an elusive writer who sought to protect the world’s last wild places; there is adventure, beauty, compassion, and deep insight on nearly every page. Compellingly crafted and doggedly researched, True Nature is a masterpiece of literary biography.” — HEATHER CLARK, Pulitzer Prize finalist for Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath
“A nuanced account of the brilliant, driven, complicated man who gave us The Snow Leopard. Peter Matthiessen was always seeking something bigger, something more profound. And this wonderful biography echoes that ambition and questing spirit.” — CAL FLYN, Sunday Times bestselling author of Islands of Abandonment
“Comprehensive, deeply researched and lucidly written, this is the definitive biography of a complicated, fascinating and sometimes exasperating man.” — ADAM SISMAN, author of John le Carré: The Biography
“Peter Matthiessen was a restless seeker after the secrets of the universe—in nature, in psychedelic drugs, in Zen. And he kept many secrets of his own—Paris Review colleagues didn’t know he worked for the CIA; wives didn’t know how many lovers he had. Haunted by privilege, he seemed most comfortable where he least fit in, exhilarated by friction and difficulty, often created by his own Melvillean appetites. In his writing, he could make contradictions cohere and even bend reality to his tenacious gift. Lance Richardson, likewise, shapes the story of this wounded, angry, charismatic man into an irresistible portrait, alive with twentieth-century counterculture ideals that burned with hope and then burned out. Some of Matthiessen’s books read like an elegy to the planet, and this biography reads like an elegy to the last of the cool WASP men. It’s quite a story.” — KATHERINE BUCKNELL, author of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Tukten, Peter Matthiessen, Jang-bu, Gyaltsen, and Ang Dawa at the Saldang Pass in Dolpo, Nepal, November 1973.