Peter Matthiessen





Peter Matthiessen

Author profile


born
May 22, 1927 in New York City, The United States

gender
male

genre


About this author

Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The Paris Review. Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he has published six other works of fiction, including Far Tortuga and Raditzer. Mr. Matthiessen's parallel career as a naturalist and explorer has resulted in numerous widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them The Snow Leopard, which was awarded the National Book Award for non-fiction. He won the National Book Award for fiction in 2008 for his novel Shadow Country. He lives in Sagaponack, New York.


Average rating: 4.01 · 8,282 ratings · 1,100 reviews · 51 distinct works
The Snow Leopard
4.11 of 5 stars 4.11 avg rating — 2,323 ratings — published 1978 — 22 editions
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Shadow Country
3.95 of 5 stars 3.95 avg rating — 1,007 ratings — published 2008 — 14 editions
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In the Spirit of Crazy Horse
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4.22 of 5 stars 4.22 avg rating — 871 ratings — published 1980 — 10 editions
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At Play in the Fields of th...
4.01 of 5 stars 4.01 avg rating — 755 ratings — published 1965 — 23 editions
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Killing Mister Watson
3.87 of 5 stars 3.87 avg rating — 440 ratings10 editions
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Far Tortuga
3.9 of 5 stars 3.90 avg rating — 305 ratings — published 1975 — 7 editions
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The Tree Where Man Was Born
4.05 of 5 stars 4.05 avg rating — 147 ratings — published 1972 — 21 editions
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Lost Man's River
3.89 of 5 stars 3.89 avg rating — 131 ratings — published 1997 — 7 editions
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Nine-Headed Dragon River: Z...
3.82 of 5 stars 3.82 avg rating — 110 ratings — published 1986 — 6 editions
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Bone by Bone
4.01 of 5 stars 4.01 avg rating — 104 ratings6 editions
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More books by Peter Matthiessen…
The Tree Where Man Was Born African Silences Sand Rivers
The African Trilogy (3 books)
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3.9260869565217393 of 5 stars 3.93 avg rating — 230 ratings

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“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.”
Peter Matthiessen

“Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”
Peter Matthiessen

“And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.”
Peter Matthiessen, The Snow Leopard

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