From today’s NYTimes obit on Peter Mathiesson, who just died and left a huge body of work: Stephen Jay Gould called Mr. Matthiessen “our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition.” He was the only writer to win the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. His fourth novel, “At Play in the Fields of the Lord” (1965), grew out of his reporting for “The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness” (1961). “Perhaps the power of Matthiessen’s writing in part derives from his ability to tap into his dark side, his Jungian shadow,” a biographer, William Dowie, wrote. “If so, it would explain at least one similarity between him and the writers to whom he is sometimes compared in his major fiction: Melville, Conrad and Dostoyevsky.” “Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons of Stone Age New Guinea” (1962); “Oomingmak: The Expedition to the Musk Ox Island in the Bering Sea” (1967); “The Shorebirds of North America” (1967, revised as “The Wind Birds” in 1973); “Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark” (1971); “The Tree Where Man Was Born” (1972), a contemplative account of East Africa; and “Sand Rivers” (1981), about a safari in the Selous Game Preserve in Tanzania. Travels with Cesar Chavez led to the 1969 book “Sal Si Puedes (Escape if You Can): Cesar Chavez and the New American Revolution,” and “In the Spirit of Crazy Horse” (1983) dissected the prosecution and conviction of Leonard Peltier in the murder of two Federal Bureau of Investigation agents in 1975 at Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. His last novel, “In Paradise,” tells the story of a group that comes together for a meditative retreat at the site of a former Nazi death camp. Such retreats were familiar to him. He regularly welcomed Zen students to a zendo, a place of meditation, on his grounds.
Posted on: Mon, 07 Apr 2014 03:10:32 +0000
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