Peter Matthiessen, the naturalist and writer, died Saturday. He was eighty-six. Matthiessen had an unusually full life: he wrote novels and nonfiction, helped found The Paris Review, worked as a fisherman and (briefly) for the C.I.A., and travelled the world. He wrote about many of his travels in The New Yorker.
Over three months in 1961, under the title “The Last Wilderness,” the magazine published Matthiessen’s mesmerizing account of his journey, by ship, to the Amazon and throughout the wildernesses of South America. (The first, second, and third parts are available to subscribers; the material was later published as “The Cloud Forest,” and Matthiessen wrote a novel based on the same journey, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord.”) Among his many other journeys, Matthiessen travelled to Alaska to write about a plan to capture a herd of musk ox; to the Caribbean to write about turtle hunting; to California to profile Cesar Chavez; to Africa to write about the Serengeti and the people who live there. In 1978, he wrote about his travels in Tibet and the Himalayas, under the title “The Snow Leopard”; when it was published as a book, it won the the National Book Award for nonfiction. Matthiessen went to Siberia to write about endangered cranes, and to Greenland to write about Inuit whalers. In 1997, when he was seventy years old, he travelled to Siberia again to write “Tiger in the Snow,” about a rare species of tiger which lives in the Russian Far East.
All of these stories are available to subscribers in our archive. We’ve unlocked part one of “The Cloud Forest” for non-subscribers, too.
Photograph by Ulf Andersen/Getty.
