Peter Matthiessen
American literature in the mid-twentieth century saw a growing number of writers who moved fluidly between fiction, nonfiction, and environmental writing, reflecting a broader cultural restlessness about the natural world and human history. Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City on May 22, 1927, and went on to become one of the more versatile American voices of that era, working as a novelist, historian, and screenwriter while writing in English throughout his career.
Educated at St. Bernard's School, Hotchkiss School, and Yale University, Matthiessen built a body of work that crossed genre lines with some consistency. His notable work includes The Snow Leopard, which helped establish his reputation across both literary and naturalist circles. He also received the Society of American Historians Prize for Historical Fiction, reflecting the range of his output — a writer whose work touched on the novel, the historical record, and the screen.
That range drew recognition from multiple corners. Matthiessen received the National Book Award, the John Burroughs Medal, the Heinz Award, the Helmerich Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters over the course of his career. He died on April 5, 2014, in Sagaponack, having accumulated honors that spanned literary fiction, historical writing, and nature writing.
Quotes by Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen's insights on:
Well, he was scarcely a parfit gentil knight; as Wolfie said, he looked like some Hollywood Geronimo trying to kick a ninety-dollar habit.
And then there was the small matter of the snow leopard, whose terrible beauty is the very stuff of human longing. Its uncompromising yellow eyes, wired into the depths of its unfathomable spirit, gaze out from the cover of innumerable editions. It is, I think, the animal I would most like to be eaten by.
Illuminated by the same joyful curiosity and erudition, lyric writing, and plain love of life that made a classic of Archie Carr’s The Windward Road.
From Kathmandu there is a road through Gorkha Country to Pokhara, in the central foothills; farther west, no roads exist at all. The road winds through steep gorges of the Trisuli River, now in torrent; dirty whitecaps filled the rapids, and the brown flood was thickened every now and again by thunderous rockslides down the walls of the ravine.
For people who must live from day to day, past and future have small relevance, and their grasp of it is fleeting; they live in the moment, a very precious gift that we have lost.
When we are mired in the relative world, never lifting our gaze to the mystery, our life is stunted, incomplete; we are filled with yearning for that paradise that is lost when, as young children, we replace it with words and ideas and abstractions – such as merit, such as past, present, and future – our direct, spontaneous experience of the thing itself, in the beauty and precision of this present moment.
It is difficult to adjust because I do not know who is adjusting; I am no longer that old person and not yet the new.
