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True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen
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.
“A stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus
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.”
“A stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen.”—Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus
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.”
736 pages, Hardcover
Published October 14, 2025
About the author
Lance Richardson
2 books45 followersLance Richardson's new book, TRUE NATURE: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen, will be published in October 2025 by Pantheon (US) and Chatto & Windus (UK/Commonwealth). His first book, HOUSE OF NUTTER: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and spotlighted on "The New Yorker Recommends." It was also named one of the notable books of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. It is currently being adapted for television by a major studio.
Lance has published widely in newspapers and magazines. He holds a masters degree in longform journalism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Lance has published widely in newspapers and magazines. He holds a masters degree in longform journalism from the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, NYU. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont, and lives in Providence, Rhode Island.
Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 46 reviews
October 25, 2025
I will just repeat something I wrote to a friend about my father, and this book, (which is, to me, right up there with the new biography of Guagin.) True Nature is very good, and also, honest about a gifted, charismatic and extremely difficult person who was a one of our best writers, and did a lot of selfless and beneficial work in his life. But also left a trail of disappointments, betrayals, and damage in his own family. If I can manage any objectivity at all, I will say that it's a riveting story, well researched, and well told.True Nature is pretty much true, and I think he deserved that.
March 17, 2026
Lance Richardson’s True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen is both an act of biography and an act of tracking. The subtitle is precise. This is not simply a life of Peter Matthiessen, though it is unapologetically that — from his Old New York lineage to his death in 2014 in Sagaponack, Long Island, surrounded by family and Zen students. It’s something narrower and, I think, more honest: an account of the pursuit that animated that life. The chase. The longing. The way he spent decades trying to get free of himself and never fully did.
Richardson opens with the problem that plagued almost everyone who knew Matthiessen: he was many men at once, and all of them were “true,” depending on which day you met him. There is the privileged son of the East Coast establishment — St. Bernard’s, Yale, a name in the Social Register he later renounced in disgust. There is the young expatriate in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review while secretly on the payroll of the CIA, gathering literary gossip and political intelligence in the same breath. There is the commercial fisherman on Long Island, the obsessive naturalist in the field notebook sense of the word, the antiwar and Indigenous rights activist, the advocate for prisoners and tribal sovereignty at the height of federal repression of the American Indian Movement. There is the seeker, shuttling from sesshin to sesshin, eventually ordained and transmitted as a Zen teacher, and in the end a roshi, “Muryo Roshi,” still admitting that he remained thick with anger, vanity, lust, and foolishness even after decades on the cushion.
The book’s method is to braid those selves without softening the edges between them. Richardson doesn’t write like an apologist, and he doesn’t pose as a judge. He writes like someone who has done the walking. He hiked where Matthiessen hiked. He read the journals that weren’t meant for public eyes. He interviewed the wives, lovers, children, editors, comrades, enemies. He follows the body. He notes the temperature in the Catskills zendo where Matthiessen sat through pain after the death of his second wife, Deborah Love, in January 1972. He notes the smell of rot and raccoon scat in the gutted Sagaponack writing shack, years after Matthiessen’s death, where a fading Sasquatch poster still leaned against a wall. The physical trail matters because the book is arguing something: that Peter Matthiessen did not exactly evolve; he accumulated.
We watch him accumulating vows. We watch him accumulating harm.
A through-line of True Nature is that Matthiessen was driven by a restlessness he could neither satisfy nor outrun. He names it himself, in different decades, as “deep restlessness,” “hunger,” “unease,” “the need to get rid of myself.” He spent his life trying to burn that off. Sometimes he tried to burn it off in disciplined forms — meditation, sesshin, Zen vows, the work of taking the precepts and receiving a Buddhist name, Ishin (“One Mind”), then later the transmission that made him Muryo Sensei and finally Muryo Roshi. Sometimes he tried to burn it off in the field — the Amazon in flood season, New Guinea highlands, the shark-thick shallows of Australia, blue sheep country in the Himalayas, the ice-blind passes of Dolpo that produced The Snow Leopard. Sometimes he tried to burn it off with love and sex, in quick, consuming attachments that he rationalized as tenderness and which often left wreckage, especially for the women who loved him and the children who watched him drift away again.
Richardson is clear on something that many admirers of Matthiessen’s environmental and political writing tend to glide past: he could be cruel at home. The portrait of his second marriage, to Deborah Love, is devastating without feeling lurid. We see her dying of cancer, chanting with their Zen teacher as she goes, and Peter, in the aftermath, unmoored in his Long Island house, not eating, dishes stacked, children drifting, friends finding him effectively catatonic. We also see, within mere months of Deborah’s cremation, the same man writing to another woman, swearing he wants nothing inappropriate from her and then, in the next breath, calling the note “a love letter.” Richardson doesn’t use this to accuse him of hypocrisy. He uses it to show the split at the heart of Matthiessen’s character: the man in robe and rakusu, vowing to dedicate his life to compassion, and the man who could not tolerate aloneness for very long, even when that aloneness was the cost of honesty.
That tension becomes even starker in the last act of his life. In Chapter 25, as Matthiessen is dying of acute myeloid leukemia in 2013–14, Richardson shows the household under siege — Maria, his third wife, furious and gutted as another woman in his Zen orbit grows close to him; Peter, frail and terrified, clinging to both of them in different registers; their students and friends circling in grief, loyalty, resentment, and disbelief. The book does not romanticize any of that. There is no halo around the “spiritual teacher in winter.” There’s a man who has taught for years that clinging is the source of suffering, and who, at the end, still clings: to being needed, to being desired, to being consoled. It is unsparing, and it feels true.
Matthiessen’s public life is equally complicated, and True Nature is at its best when it sets that complexity in motion instead of flattening it out. His career in nonfiction can be read as one long argument: that environmental devastation, racism, colonial extraction, and labor exploitation are not separate crises but one crisis, expressed in different places and against different bodies. He came to that position through experience. In the Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands, he traced how the plunder of a place went hand in hand with the terrorizing of Seminole and Black communities, and with the mythmaking that later cleaned the story up for polite retelling. In South Dakota in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the American Indian Movement and the Black Hills Alliance, he documented how uranium companies, state officials, and the FBI converged on Lakota land rights and community resistance, and how the prosecution of Leonard Peltier fit into that convergence. He staked his name on In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, an investigation into the Pine Ridge shootout and its aftermath, and took blows for it: multimillion-dollar libel suits from the governor of South Dakota and an FBI agent, a publisher spooked into pulping copies, years of stress.
Richardson does not mythologize this as martyrdom. He notes that Matthiessen, in those years, shifted from skeptical distance about certain “radical Indians” to an explicit partisan stance: “I’m on the side of the Indians,” he said, arguing that neutrality in the face of state power was itself a dishonest pose. The book treats that shift not as a fall from journalistic grace but as a choice — a political, ethical choice — about what the work of a writer is for. That has obvious relevance now. And Richardson is careful to include the counterpoint voiced by Native scholars and writers who admired Matthiessen’s advocacy but bristled at his tendency to idealize “Traditional Indians” in almost mythic terms, collapsing many nations and internal disagreements into one pure figure of ecological wisdom. They called that move its own kind of appropriation. The book lets that critique stand.
There’s a similar refusal to sand down contradiction in how True Nature handles Matthiessen’s Zen life. We follow him from the early 1970s, when Zen is still half-exotic Manhattan counterculture, through his immersion in a New York sangha under a charismatic Rinzai teacher, Eido Shimano, who would later be accused — credibly and repeatedly — of using his position to pressure and manipulate female students into sexual relationships. When those accusations detonated, and Shimano reacted by blaming his students and trying to purge dissenters, Matthiessen left. He was shaken enough to wonder, privately, whether the same teacher had ever crossed a line with Deborah Love. That is a brutal moment in the book, because it shows how betrayal in a spiritual hierarchy back-propagates into memory: it can stain even your grief.
From there, Matthiessen moves west, into contact with Bernie Glassman and Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles. The Zen he finds in Maezumi’s orbit is less theatrical, more workmanlike: predawn chanting in converted houses in Koreatown; “encouragement sticks” instead of punitive blows; koan practice embedded in a neighborhood where you walk past laundry lines to reach the zendo. We see him, in his fifties and sixties, not as a celebrity dropping in for enlightenment hits, but as a man doing dishes, sewing robes, insulating walls for a Zen monastery in the Catskills, arguing with his teacher about whether the beavers on monastery land have a right to remain. He will later receive shiho, then inka, formal transmissions that authorize him to teach and eventually recognize him as a roshi. He uses that authority to officiate weddings, funerals, and memorials, and to sit with people in moments of national crisis — Oklahoma City, 9/11 — and ask how to respond without hate.
The book could have turned that into a redemption arc. It doesn’t. Richardson shows how power inside a spiritual community complicates intimacy. By the 1990s and 2000s, Matthiessen is running a regular zendo in the Hamptons, giving dokusan (private interview) upstairs in a converted barn, wearing robes in front of a homemade altar, and setting rules about perfume and ego display for locals who might otherwise treat “Zen with the famous writer” as a novelty. At the same time, the work of being the stable one for everyone else leaves him exhausted, short-tempered, and constantly in danger of slipping into the same pattern of being “needed” by women students that caused so much trouble in Zen communities before him. By the end of his life, the sangha itself is showing hairline cracks of jealousy and hurt. Richardson does not pretend that transmission papers erase human appetite.
One of the strongest sections of True Nature is the long middle stretch on the Watson books. Matthiessen’s decades-long obsession with Edgar J. Watson — the Everglades planter and suspected killer shot dead by his neighbors in 1910 — becomes a kind of case study for the whole biography. He first heard the Watson legend as a boy, fishing those waters with his father. He carried it for most of his adult life. The material eventually swelled into Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone, and finally into Shadow Country, the single-volume reworking that he completed late in life. Richardson walks us through that process as both artistic discipline and psychological self-dissection. To render Watson — brutal, magnetic, exploitative, self-mythologizing — Matthiessen had to wade into ideas of manhood, race, labor, and violence that repelled and fascinated him. He had to listen to families in the Ten Thousand Islands who still carried fear and shame a century later. He had to accept that telling this story honestly would mean reopening wounds for people who did not necessarily want an outsider with a New York name to define their dead. The Watson work nearly broke him, and the book makes that cost feel concrete.
Late chapters are quiet, and they’re the ones that have stayed with me. Richard¬son writes about the final winter of 2013–2014 with the kind of detail you only get when you’ve sat in the same rooms. Matthiessen is in and out of hospitals, cycling through chemo for acute myeloid leukemia that he knows will not cure him but might buy months. He is still doing interviews for what will be his last novel, In Paradise — a book set at a Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz, where participants sit in meditation on the grounds of extermination and try to make sense of the idea of compassion in a place built for annihilation. He is trying to hold his zendo together, asking his Dharma heir, Michel Engu Dobbs, to carry the sangha forward. He is frightened of pain. He is explicit about that. Not death, exactly — pain.
In the last days, drugged, oxygen mask on and off, he begs for release. His children insist he be brought home. He dies in Sagaponack, in April 2014, in a bedroom converted to hospice, with chanting nearby — the Kannon Sutra he had carried in his pocket on Himalayan trails and recited for others in mourning. His ashes are buried beside Deborah Love. The grave is marked with shells and feathers, not marble.
After his death, Richardson returns to that property years later. The zendo is swallowed by vines. The writing shack is collapsing. The big whale skull he once hauled up from the beach sits weathered. The human presence is already fading; what remains is weather, birds, the weeds pushing through the floorboards. The image is not sentimental. It’s ecological. It invites a thought Matthiessen raised again and again as a teacher: when the “small relative mind” dissolves — the personality called Peter Matthiessen — what’s left is the larger field of awareness he called Buddha Mind, which is not a person and doesn’t need a name. That is, in effect, his faith.
If there’s a meaningful criticism to level at True Nature, it’s that at times the biography can feel, for lack of a better word, overfull. Matthiessen lived like he was cramming four or five different lives into one frame, and Richardson refuses to thin any of them down for comfort. The result is a book that can feel, in places, like moving through thickets of correspondence, expedition journals, lawsuits, Zen transmissions, and domestic blowups without much air between. You can understand why the author resists cutting — because part of his argument is that Matthiessen never stopped moving, and to simplify him too aggressively would be to lie. But there are stretches where the sheer density of movement risks emotional numbness. You are told, in meticulous detail, what Matthiessen is doing and saying and swearing to do next, and you can start to lose the pulse of how it feels in that exact moment, to him and to the people near him. That’s not constant, but it happens.
Still, the achievement here is large. Richardson delivers the first full biography of a figure who, for half a century, seemed to exist in legend even while alive. The book is clear-eyed about the harm Matthiessen caused — which matters, because too many nature-sage myths sand that down — and generous without being forgiving. It also gets at why Matthiessen mattered, beyond the usual line about The Snow Leopard being beautiful. It shows why his work on Native sovereignty and on environmental justice in places like the Black Hills and Pine Ridge helped redefine what literary nonfiction could be: not just description of landscape, but testimony against systems built to erase people living on that landscape. It shows how his Zen practice was not an ornament but a scaffold he kept rebuilding, sometimes painfully, so that he could keep going. It shows the way he tried, however imperfectly, to fuse attention, ethics, and craft into one act.
Most importantly, True Nature does something that feels rare in literary biography: it refuses to sell you the fantasy that the subject solved himself. In these pages, enlightenment is not a finish line, activism is not an absolution, art is not a cleansing fire. Matthiessen dies still wrestling with ego and desire. He dies afraid. He dies loved and resented, revered and doubted, needed and accused. He dies mid-conversation. And yet, in the quiet of that last room, with the chanting and the salt air off the Atlantic, he also dies more or less on his own terms, which were simple: at home, among his people, without pretense.
That honesty is the book’s real gift. It makes True Nature not just a biography of Peter Matthiessen, but a record of a very American kind of pilgrimage: from privilege into self-reproach; from ego into service and back into ego; from the romance of wilderness into the politics of land, water, labor, and law; from mystical hunger into day-to-day caregiving; and, finally, from the story of “me” into whatever comes after the story ends.
My rating: 88 out of 100.
Richardson opens with the problem that plagued almost everyone who knew Matthiessen: he was many men at once, and all of them were “true,” depending on which day you met him. There is the privileged son of the East Coast establishment — St. Bernard’s, Yale, a name in the Social Register he later renounced in disgust. There is the young expatriate in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review while secretly on the payroll of the CIA, gathering literary gossip and political intelligence in the same breath. There is the commercial fisherman on Long Island, the obsessive naturalist in the field notebook sense of the word, the antiwar and Indigenous rights activist, the advocate for prisoners and tribal sovereignty at the height of federal repression of the American Indian Movement. There is the seeker, shuttling from sesshin to sesshin, eventually ordained and transmitted as a Zen teacher, and in the end a roshi, “Muryo Roshi,” still admitting that he remained thick with anger, vanity, lust, and foolishness even after decades on the cushion.
The book’s method is to braid those selves without softening the edges between them. Richardson doesn’t write like an apologist, and he doesn’t pose as a judge. He writes like someone who has done the walking. He hiked where Matthiessen hiked. He read the journals that weren’t meant for public eyes. He interviewed the wives, lovers, children, editors, comrades, enemies. He follows the body. He notes the temperature in the Catskills zendo where Matthiessen sat through pain after the death of his second wife, Deborah Love, in January 1972. He notes the smell of rot and raccoon scat in the gutted Sagaponack writing shack, years after Matthiessen’s death, where a fading Sasquatch poster still leaned against a wall. The physical trail matters because the book is arguing something: that Peter Matthiessen did not exactly evolve; he accumulated.
We watch him accumulating vows. We watch him accumulating harm.
A through-line of True Nature is that Matthiessen was driven by a restlessness he could neither satisfy nor outrun. He names it himself, in different decades, as “deep restlessness,” “hunger,” “unease,” “the need to get rid of myself.” He spent his life trying to burn that off. Sometimes he tried to burn it off in disciplined forms — meditation, sesshin, Zen vows, the work of taking the precepts and receiving a Buddhist name, Ishin (“One Mind”), then later the transmission that made him Muryo Sensei and finally Muryo Roshi. Sometimes he tried to burn it off in the field — the Amazon in flood season, New Guinea highlands, the shark-thick shallows of Australia, blue sheep country in the Himalayas, the ice-blind passes of Dolpo that produced The Snow Leopard. Sometimes he tried to burn it off with love and sex, in quick, consuming attachments that he rationalized as tenderness and which often left wreckage, especially for the women who loved him and the children who watched him drift away again.
Richardson is clear on something that many admirers of Matthiessen’s environmental and political writing tend to glide past: he could be cruel at home. The portrait of his second marriage, to Deborah Love, is devastating without feeling lurid. We see her dying of cancer, chanting with their Zen teacher as she goes, and Peter, in the aftermath, unmoored in his Long Island house, not eating, dishes stacked, children drifting, friends finding him effectively catatonic. We also see, within mere months of Deborah’s cremation, the same man writing to another woman, swearing he wants nothing inappropriate from her and then, in the next breath, calling the note “a love letter.” Richardson doesn’t use this to accuse him of hypocrisy. He uses it to show the split at the heart of Matthiessen’s character: the man in robe and rakusu, vowing to dedicate his life to compassion, and the man who could not tolerate aloneness for very long, even when that aloneness was the cost of honesty.
That tension becomes even starker in the last act of his life. In Chapter 25, as Matthiessen is dying of acute myeloid leukemia in 2013–14, Richardson shows the household under siege — Maria, his third wife, furious and gutted as another woman in his Zen orbit grows close to him; Peter, frail and terrified, clinging to both of them in different registers; their students and friends circling in grief, loyalty, resentment, and disbelief. The book does not romanticize any of that. There is no halo around the “spiritual teacher in winter.” There’s a man who has taught for years that clinging is the source of suffering, and who, at the end, still clings: to being needed, to being desired, to being consoled. It is unsparing, and it feels true.
Matthiessen’s public life is equally complicated, and True Nature is at its best when it sets that complexity in motion instead of flattening it out. His career in nonfiction can be read as one long argument: that environmental devastation, racism, colonial extraction, and labor exploitation are not separate crises but one crisis, expressed in different places and against different bodies. He came to that position through experience. In the Everglades and Ten Thousand Islands, he traced how the plunder of a place went hand in hand with the terrorizing of Seminole and Black communities, and with the mythmaking that later cleaned the story up for polite retelling. In South Dakota in the late 1970s and early 1980s, following the American Indian Movement and the Black Hills Alliance, he documented how uranium companies, state officials, and the FBI converged on Lakota land rights and community resistance, and how the prosecution of Leonard Peltier fit into that convergence. He staked his name on In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, an investigation into the Pine Ridge shootout and its aftermath, and took blows for it: multimillion-dollar libel suits from the governor of South Dakota and an FBI agent, a publisher spooked into pulping copies, years of stress.
Richardson does not mythologize this as martyrdom. He notes that Matthiessen, in those years, shifted from skeptical distance about certain “radical Indians” to an explicit partisan stance: “I’m on the side of the Indians,” he said, arguing that neutrality in the face of state power was itself a dishonest pose. The book treats that shift not as a fall from journalistic grace but as a choice — a political, ethical choice — about what the work of a writer is for. That has obvious relevance now. And Richardson is careful to include the counterpoint voiced by Native scholars and writers who admired Matthiessen’s advocacy but bristled at his tendency to idealize “Traditional Indians” in almost mythic terms, collapsing many nations and internal disagreements into one pure figure of ecological wisdom. They called that move its own kind of appropriation. The book lets that critique stand.
There’s a similar refusal to sand down contradiction in how True Nature handles Matthiessen’s Zen life. We follow him from the early 1970s, when Zen is still half-exotic Manhattan counterculture, through his immersion in a New York sangha under a charismatic Rinzai teacher, Eido Shimano, who would later be accused — credibly and repeatedly — of using his position to pressure and manipulate female students into sexual relationships. When those accusations detonated, and Shimano reacted by blaming his students and trying to purge dissenters, Matthiessen left. He was shaken enough to wonder, privately, whether the same teacher had ever crossed a line with Deborah Love. That is a brutal moment in the book, because it shows how betrayal in a spiritual hierarchy back-propagates into memory: it can stain even your grief.
From there, Matthiessen moves west, into contact with Bernie Glassman and Hakuyu Taizan Maezumi Roshi in Los Angeles. The Zen he finds in Maezumi’s orbit is less theatrical, more workmanlike: predawn chanting in converted houses in Koreatown; “encouragement sticks” instead of punitive blows; koan practice embedded in a neighborhood where you walk past laundry lines to reach the zendo. We see him, in his fifties and sixties, not as a celebrity dropping in for enlightenment hits, but as a man doing dishes, sewing robes, insulating walls for a Zen monastery in the Catskills, arguing with his teacher about whether the beavers on monastery land have a right to remain. He will later receive shiho, then inka, formal transmissions that authorize him to teach and eventually recognize him as a roshi. He uses that authority to officiate weddings, funerals, and memorials, and to sit with people in moments of national crisis — Oklahoma City, 9/11 — and ask how to respond without hate.
The book could have turned that into a redemption arc. It doesn’t. Richardson shows how power inside a spiritual community complicates intimacy. By the 1990s and 2000s, Matthiessen is running a regular zendo in the Hamptons, giving dokusan (private interview) upstairs in a converted barn, wearing robes in front of a homemade altar, and setting rules about perfume and ego display for locals who might otherwise treat “Zen with the famous writer” as a novelty. At the same time, the work of being the stable one for everyone else leaves him exhausted, short-tempered, and constantly in danger of slipping into the same pattern of being “needed” by women students that caused so much trouble in Zen communities before him. By the end of his life, the sangha itself is showing hairline cracks of jealousy and hurt. Richardson does not pretend that transmission papers erase human appetite.
One of the strongest sections of True Nature is the long middle stretch on the Watson books. Matthiessen’s decades-long obsession with Edgar J. Watson — the Everglades planter and suspected killer shot dead by his neighbors in 1910 — becomes a kind of case study for the whole biography. He first heard the Watson legend as a boy, fishing those waters with his father. He carried it for most of his adult life. The material eventually swelled into Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone, and finally into Shadow Country, the single-volume reworking that he completed late in life. Richardson walks us through that process as both artistic discipline and psychological self-dissection. To render Watson — brutal, magnetic, exploitative, self-mythologizing — Matthiessen had to wade into ideas of manhood, race, labor, and violence that repelled and fascinated him. He had to listen to families in the Ten Thousand Islands who still carried fear and shame a century later. He had to accept that telling this story honestly would mean reopening wounds for people who did not necessarily want an outsider with a New York name to define their dead. The Watson work nearly broke him, and the book makes that cost feel concrete.
Late chapters are quiet, and they’re the ones that have stayed with me. Richard¬son writes about the final winter of 2013–2014 with the kind of detail you only get when you’ve sat in the same rooms. Matthiessen is in and out of hospitals, cycling through chemo for acute myeloid leukemia that he knows will not cure him but might buy months. He is still doing interviews for what will be his last novel, In Paradise — a book set at a Bearing Witness retreat at Auschwitz, where participants sit in meditation on the grounds of extermination and try to make sense of the idea of compassion in a place built for annihilation. He is trying to hold his zendo together, asking his Dharma heir, Michel Engu Dobbs, to carry the sangha forward. He is frightened of pain. He is explicit about that. Not death, exactly — pain.
In the last days, drugged, oxygen mask on and off, he begs for release. His children insist he be brought home. He dies in Sagaponack, in April 2014, in a bedroom converted to hospice, with chanting nearby — the Kannon Sutra he had carried in his pocket on Himalayan trails and recited for others in mourning. His ashes are buried beside Deborah Love. The grave is marked with shells and feathers, not marble.
After his death, Richardson returns to that property years later. The zendo is swallowed by vines. The writing shack is collapsing. The big whale skull he once hauled up from the beach sits weathered. The human presence is already fading; what remains is weather, birds, the weeds pushing through the floorboards. The image is not sentimental. It’s ecological. It invites a thought Matthiessen raised again and again as a teacher: when the “small relative mind” dissolves — the personality called Peter Matthiessen — what’s left is the larger field of awareness he called Buddha Mind, which is not a person and doesn’t need a name. That is, in effect, his faith.
If there’s a meaningful criticism to level at True Nature, it’s that at times the biography can feel, for lack of a better word, overfull. Matthiessen lived like he was cramming four or five different lives into one frame, and Richardson refuses to thin any of them down for comfort. The result is a book that can feel, in places, like moving through thickets of correspondence, expedition journals, lawsuits, Zen transmissions, and domestic blowups without much air between. You can understand why the author resists cutting — because part of his argument is that Matthiessen never stopped moving, and to simplify him too aggressively would be to lie. But there are stretches where the sheer density of movement risks emotional numbness. You are told, in meticulous detail, what Matthiessen is doing and saying and swearing to do next, and you can start to lose the pulse of how it feels in that exact moment, to him and to the people near him. That’s not constant, but it happens.
Still, the achievement here is large. Richardson delivers the first full biography of a figure who, for half a century, seemed to exist in legend even while alive. The book is clear-eyed about the harm Matthiessen caused — which matters, because too many nature-sage myths sand that down — and generous without being forgiving. It also gets at why Matthiessen mattered, beyond the usual line about The Snow Leopard being beautiful. It shows why his work on Native sovereignty and on environmental justice in places like the Black Hills and Pine Ridge helped redefine what literary nonfiction could be: not just description of landscape, but testimony against systems built to erase people living on that landscape. It shows how his Zen practice was not an ornament but a scaffold he kept rebuilding, sometimes painfully, so that he could keep going. It shows the way he tried, however imperfectly, to fuse attention, ethics, and craft into one act.
Most importantly, True Nature does something that feels rare in literary biography: it refuses to sell you the fantasy that the subject solved himself. In these pages, enlightenment is not a finish line, activism is not an absolution, art is not a cleansing fire. Matthiessen dies still wrestling with ego and desire. He dies afraid. He dies loved and resented, revered and doubted, needed and accused. He dies mid-conversation. And yet, in the quiet of that last room, with the chanting and the salt air off the Atlantic, he also dies more or less on his own terms, which were simple: at home, among his people, without pretense.
That honesty is the book’s real gift. It makes True Nature not just a biography of Peter Matthiessen, but a record of a very American kind of pilgrimage: from privilege into self-reproach; from ego into service and back into ego; from the romance of wilderness into the politics of land, water, labor, and law; from mystical hunger into day-to-day caregiving; and, finally, from the story of “me” into whatever comes after the story ends.
My rating: 88 out of 100.
May 11, 2026
I am no fan of monster biographies* or autobiographies (looking particularly at you, Bill Barr), and so you should know upfront I did NOT read this whole book, but went into it with a few specific goals: to read about Matthiessen's writing of The Snow Leopard and so decide whether I should now reread it, some fifty years later (answer: probably); and whether I should also bother reading a few other of his books that have been sitting on my shelf for just years, specifically his 1961 The Cloud Forest (A: definitely yes, especially since it's compared here to Peter Fleming's classic Brazilian Adventure), and his 1986 Nine-Headed Dragon River : Zen Journals, 1969-1985 (A: absolutely not!!).
Oh, and I was also curious about his work in the early 1950's as a CIA "non-official cover" spy, since I'm also currently reading the memoir of that most famous NOC of all (or was she really? — you'll have to wait for that review), Valerie Plame. Despite my interest in the Agency's history, I had never heard of Matthiessen's connection before, although apparently that's been pubic knowledge since the New York Times outed him in 1977...guess I just wasn't paying attention. Anyway — yes, he worked for them in Paris for a few years before his sympathies took a lifelong swing to the left (not at all a bad thing) in his mid-20s, and I have to admit his timing there was pretty good; he got out just as the Agency was combining its Offices of Policy Coordination and Special Operations (the covert ops "cowboys" and traditional intelligence gathering outfit respectively, although going by the names one would think just the opposite); and so he avoided any involvement in what would ultimately be a long string of unseemly ops (all of which look absolutely terrible in hindsight), including the overthrow of Mossadegh and installation of the shah in Iran, assassination of Lumumba in the Congo, Bay of Pigs in Cuba...
But I digress. After that pretty major career change, Matthiessen went on to become one hell of a writer, but also a total shit as a person — yet another of that generation of "great writers" (Buckley, Cheever, Mailer, et al) who believed their literary prowess justified varying degrees of just horrible personal behavior. And while those sordid details of his personal life are not what I was looking for in reading (my select parts of) this book, it was completely unavoidable, as one literally cannot read more than a page or two describing any of his trips to Nepal, Africa, South America, Japan or even the American West without being reminded of either their negative effects on his wife/wives and children, or the opportunities they presented for his near-constant philandering.
And so...yes, I'll at least read Cloud Forest, and perhaps even reread Snow Leopard — which played such a role in my own mid-20s "zen period" — and maybe even At Play in the Fields of the Lord. But then that's probably it for my relationship with this ultimately disappointing (if not outright distasteful) individual. And I'm frankly amazed that author Richardson was willing to spend so much time in this guy's world that he could produce this nearly 700-page work.
* Sadly, there's a new biography — Homesick for a World Unknown — of George Schaller, the famed biologist/naturalist who led the 1973 expedition in Nepal that led to The Snow Leopard, and which for me at least would be the more interesting book (his Tibet Wild has also been on my shelf here for a long time)...but again — 650 pages??
Oh, and I was also curious about his work in the early 1950's as a CIA "non-official cover" spy, since I'm also currently reading the memoir of that most famous NOC of all (or was she really? — you'll have to wait for that review), Valerie Plame. Despite my interest in the Agency's history, I had never heard of Matthiessen's connection before, although apparently that's been pubic knowledge since the New York Times outed him in 1977...guess I just wasn't paying attention. Anyway — yes, he worked for them in Paris for a few years before his sympathies took a lifelong swing to the left (not at all a bad thing) in his mid-20s, and I have to admit his timing there was pretty good; he got out just as the Agency was combining its Offices of Policy Coordination and Special Operations (the covert ops "cowboys" and traditional intelligence gathering outfit respectively, although going by the names one would think just the opposite); and so he avoided any involvement in what would ultimately be a long string of unseemly ops (all of which look absolutely terrible in hindsight), including the overthrow of Mossadegh and installation of the shah in Iran, assassination of Lumumba in the Congo, Bay of Pigs in Cuba...
But I digress. After that pretty major career change, Matthiessen went on to become one hell of a writer, but also a total shit as a person — yet another of that generation of "great writers" (Buckley, Cheever, Mailer, et al) who believed their literary prowess justified varying degrees of just horrible personal behavior. And while those sordid details of his personal life are not what I was looking for in reading (my select parts of) this book, it was completely unavoidable, as one literally cannot read more than a page or two describing any of his trips to Nepal, Africa, South America, Japan or even the American West without being reminded of either their negative effects on his wife/wives and children, or the opportunities they presented for his near-constant philandering.
And so...yes, I'll at least read Cloud Forest, and perhaps even reread Snow Leopard — which played such a role in my own mid-20s "zen period" — and maybe even At Play in the Fields of the Lord. But then that's probably it for my relationship with this ultimately disappointing (if not outright distasteful) individual. And I'm frankly amazed that author Richardson was willing to spend so much time in this guy's world that he could produce this nearly 700-page work.
* Sadly, there's a new biography — Homesick for a World Unknown — of George Schaller, the famed biologist/naturalist who led the 1973 expedition in Nepal that led to The Snow Leopard, and which for me at least would be the more interesting book (his Tibet Wild has also been on my shelf here for a long time)...but again — 650 pages??
November 1, 2025
As a rule I'm of the school of criticism that believes the text, not the author, is the thing. Yet, as a reader who believes the Watson novels are among the greatest examples of American literature ever written, I have long had a nosy curiosity about Matthiessen and his obsession with the material. Having read some of his work, notably Far Tortuga, The Snow Leopard, Men's Lives, and Indian Country (along with the four Watson books), I respect Matthiessen's craft and believe he's as fine a writer as any of his generation. As a person ... well other than the common background of prep school, Yale, and a love of the sea and writing, I was aware of his CIA flirtation, his advocacy journalism, and little else.
Richardson plumbs the details of the man's life and presents an exhaustive but sometimes tedious recounting of Matthiessen's obsessions with Watson, Big Foot, Zen, and extra-marital affairs. I suppose Matthiessen's overwhelming selfishness and his flaws as a man, husband, and father are to be expected by someone who spent most of his life either traveling or locked alone, the proverbial man alone in a room, creating and shaping some of the finest literature of our time; but frankly, this biography reaffirms my distaste for nosing around in the dirty laundry of another man's life. I have to assume the book is as true a portrait of the artist as one could hope to be, and while Matthiessen flirted with (and rejected) a personal memoir as "droppings" (as in bird droppings), I expect he would not have been a fan of this book and would have picked it apart as obsessively as he edited and redrafted his own books.
This book is a labor of love on Richardson's behalf, and was a labor to plow through. I can only imagine the effort it took to research it and complete it.
Richardson plumbs the details of the man's life and presents an exhaustive but sometimes tedious recounting of Matthiessen's obsessions with Watson, Big Foot, Zen, and extra-marital affairs. I suppose Matthiessen's overwhelming selfishness and his flaws as a man, husband, and father are to be expected by someone who spent most of his life either traveling or locked alone, the proverbial man alone in a room, creating and shaping some of the finest literature of our time; but frankly, this biography reaffirms my distaste for nosing around in the dirty laundry of another man's life. I have to assume the book is as true a portrait of the artist as one could hope to be, and while Matthiessen flirted with (and rejected) a personal memoir as "droppings" (as in bird droppings), I expect he would not have been a fan of this book and would have picked it apart as obsessively as he edited and redrafted his own books.
This book is a labor of love on Richardson's behalf, and was a labor to plow through. I can only imagine the effort it took to research it and complete it.
July 15, 2026
Like so many others of my generation I read The Snow Leopard, set in Mountainous Nepal and the experience that has stayed with me for decades. I subsequently read The Tree Where Man Was Born and The African Experience, but somehow, I never came across his many other publications, definitely my loss. Nevertheless, The Snow Leopard had a strong impact on me. It rested comfortably among the other great travel writers I have invested in over many years (Wilfred Thesiger, Paul Theroux, Bruce Chatwin, Colin Thubron, Michael Palin, Bill Bryson, John Krakauer, Eric Newby, Robert Byron, Freya Stark, George Orwell, Australia’s Tim Cope and Robyn Davidson.)
I ended up travelling in Nepal. I did not get to the Dolpo region but did climb to Annapurna Base Station and then years later to the Base station of Mt Everest (Qomolangma). I had wanted to travel out to Lake Rakshastal and Lake Manasarovar but the Peoples’ Republic of China had other ideas, so I was restricted to the base station of Everest. Later in his life Matthiessen faced similar difficulties.
This book is a door stopper at 700 pages. Before starting the book, I told myself that I should read 100 pages a day. I found that when I was younger, I could achieve this target. Things are different in these days, nanny naps seem to happen too often.
This is a formidable fact filled account of the extended life of Peter Matthiessen. Richardson has sourced his exhaustive account through journals, magazines, unpublished manuscripts, letters and interviews.
Richardson examines the progress of Matthiessen’s heritage and then life in microscopic detail, however, I never found there was too much detail and he held my attention to the Matthiessen story. A privileged boyhood, somewhat of a rebel in his teenage years, service in the navy in the dying days of WW2. Yale, move to Paris, surprisingly early marriage. It was at this time that Matthiessen became an agent for the CIA, a situation that was exposed in 2007 and which Matthiessen spent much time denying the full validity of the claims. Interestingly I have recently read biographies of John Le Carre and George Orwell where accusations have been made on their spying on others in their youth. It was also at this time that Matthiessen and others established The Paris Review. A magazine that is still a worthy publication, especially with its interviews of authors. It was at this time that Matthiessen’s first marriage came to its inevitable conclusion.
Matthiessen always referred to himself as a novelist, yet he had limited success in this field early in his career. By the end of his life he was recognised as a versatile and influential American author. His non-fiction showcased his skills as a nature writer and chronicler of environmental and social issues. His fiction writing is highly regarded for its literary quality and exploration of complex themes. Themes that he gathered in his travels across the globe.
The author writes of Matthiessen becoming part of the environmental movement. The 1950s in America saw a president and a country gungho about development and using all natural resources to produce more things. With this belief came the subsequent use of chemicals to eradicate any threat to man’s exploitation of the countryside.
To recount too much of this book would make this review exceedingly long. The parts that interested me the most were his expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (which I always knew as Dutch New Guinea). He visited the Dani people (specifically the Kurelu subgroup) in the Baliem Valley of central New Guinea in 1961. In the expedition was photographer Michael Rockerfeller whose subsequent disappearance has remained a mystery. They observed the tribespeople in a type of regular conflict with neighbours. Sadly, as it was acknowledged their visit affected these “primitive” “stone age” people in a negative way.
Matthiessen always saw himself as a fiction writer and the publication of his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord enhanced this belief. Many of the themes were taken from his experiences in New Guinea but the setting was South America, which he had visited previously.
Matthiessen had a strong friendship with Cesar Chavez the legendary labour leader and civil rights activist who in the very recent past has been accused of sexually abusing minors.
Some have been critical of Matthiessen’s treatment of women in his life. He married his second wife, Deborah Love in 1963. Richardson described it as a tempestuous on-again off-again relationship. Nevertheless, he cared lovingly for her when she was diagnosed with cancer and died in January 1972. He had divorced his first wife, Patsy Southgate in 1956. His treatment of his children, especially his youngest Alex has been criticised. He left Alex to go trekking on occasions not long after Alex’s mother died and Alex was quite young.
I was most interested in his book The Snow Leopard. It is probably the text that he is best known for. It won two National Book awards. It is interesting thinking back forty years and the impact it had on me and thousands of others. I do remember that in the end they never saw a Snow Leopard. The book is both a physical and spiritual journey.
The biography explores in great detail his later fiction; Killing Mister Watson (1990) Lost Man's River (1997) Bone by Bone (1999) and his 1983 account of American Indian life, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Matthiessen always claimed that he preferred to be known as a fiction writer and that non-fiction came second.
Zen Buddhism played a significant role in shaping his outlook on life, his literary voice, and his contributions to both Western literature and Eastern spiritual traditions. Matthiessen’s relationship with this belief system is peppered throughout the book, Richardson spent considerable time exploring Matthiessen and Zen Buddhism.
I am certain that Peter Matthiessen would have never been considered for an award of husband of the year or father of the year. He was a philander of the first order seeking women company during all three of his marriages. I found his behaviour appalling, but I would ask why did so many women entertain his infidelity? I asked myself where does all his adulterous behaviour fit in with his dedication to Zen Buddhism? There are several accounts of his children reflecting on their relationship with their father.
In late 2012 Matthiessen was diagnosed with leukemia, he fought the disease but succumbed on April 5, 2014, aged 86
As I turned to the last pages, closed the book and rested it in my lap my mind took me back over the previous days and weeks that Matthiessen had been part of my life. I know some were appalled at the shameful personal decisions he made and the hurt he caused to those close to him. I have recently read much about John Le Carré and George Orwell’s lives and they too were men with wandering emotions and links with other women. Without excusing their behaviour I can still saviour their writing and the pleasure it brings me.
When Matthiessen passed to that heavenly wilderness, I reflected on my own life and like Matthiessen contemplated the successes and failures. Quality biographies should encourage the reader to reflect on their own lives. Matthiessen achieved much but I did ask what hasn’t been achieved? Environmentalists are still in constant battle to preserve what natural landscape is left. Indigenous people are still asking to have their cultures respected. Hopefully readers of this biography will be inspired to continue the efforts of Matthiessen no matter how small those efforts.
I ended up travelling in Nepal. I did not get to the Dolpo region but did climb to Annapurna Base Station and then years later to the Base station of Mt Everest (Qomolangma). I had wanted to travel out to Lake Rakshastal and Lake Manasarovar but the Peoples’ Republic of China had other ideas, so I was restricted to the base station of Everest. Later in his life Matthiessen faced similar difficulties.
This book is a door stopper at 700 pages. Before starting the book, I told myself that I should read 100 pages a day. I found that when I was younger, I could achieve this target. Things are different in these days, nanny naps seem to happen too often.
This is a formidable fact filled account of the extended life of Peter Matthiessen. Richardson has sourced his exhaustive account through journals, magazines, unpublished manuscripts, letters and interviews.
Richardson examines the progress of Matthiessen’s heritage and then life in microscopic detail, however, I never found there was too much detail and he held my attention to the Matthiessen story. A privileged boyhood, somewhat of a rebel in his teenage years, service in the navy in the dying days of WW2. Yale, move to Paris, surprisingly early marriage. It was at this time that Matthiessen became an agent for the CIA, a situation that was exposed in 2007 and which Matthiessen spent much time denying the full validity of the claims. Interestingly I have recently read biographies of John Le Carre and George Orwell where accusations have been made on their spying on others in their youth. It was also at this time that Matthiessen and others established The Paris Review. A magazine that is still a worthy publication, especially with its interviews of authors. It was at this time that Matthiessen’s first marriage came to its inevitable conclusion.
Matthiessen always referred to himself as a novelist, yet he had limited success in this field early in his career. By the end of his life he was recognised as a versatile and influential American author. His non-fiction showcased his skills as a nature writer and chronicler of environmental and social issues. His fiction writing is highly regarded for its literary quality and exploration of complex themes. Themes that he gathered in his travels across the globe.
The author writes of Matthiessen becoming part of the environmental movement. The 1950s in America saw a president and a country gungho about development and using all natural resources to produce more things. With this belief came the subsequent use of chemicals to eradicate any threat to man’s exploitation of the countryside.
To recount too much of this book would make this review exceedingly long. The parts that interested me the most were his expedition to Netherlands New Guinea (which I always knew as Dutch New Guinea). He visited the Dani people (specifically the Kurelu subgroup) in the Baliem Valley of central New Guinea in 1961. In the expedition was photographer Michael Rockerfeller whose subsequent disappearance has remained a mystery. They observed the tribespeople in a type of regular conflict with neighbours. Sadly, as it was acknowledged their visit affected these “primitive” “stone age” people in a negative way.
Matthiessen always saw himself as a fiction writer and the publication of his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord enhanced this belief. Many of the themes were taken from his experiences in New Guinea but the setting was South America, which he had visited previously.
Matthiessen had a strong friendship with Cesar Chavez the legendary labour leader and civil rights activist who in the very recent past has been accused of sexually abusing minors.
Some have been critical of Matthiessen’s treatment of women in his life. He married his second wife, Deborah Love in 1963. Richardson described it as a tempestuous on-again off-again relationship. Nevertheless, he cared lovingly for her when she was diagnosed with cancer and died in January 1972. He had divorced his first wife, Patsy Southgate in 1956. His treatment of his children, especially his youngest Alex has been criticised. He left Alex to go trekking on occasions not long after Alex’s mother died and Alex was quite young.
I was most interested in his book The Snow Leopard. It is probably the text that he is best known for. It won two National Book awards. It is interesting thinking back forty years and the impact it had on me and thousands of others. I do remember that in the end they never saw a Snow Leopard. The book is both a physical and spiritual journey.
The biography explores in great detail his later fiction; Killing Mister Watson (1990) Lost Man's River (1997) Bone by Bone (1999) and his 1983 account of American Indian life, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Matthiessen always claimed that he preferred to be known as a fiction writer and that non-fiction came second.
Zen Buddhism played a significant role in shaping his outlook on life, his literary voice, and his contributions to both Western literature and Eastern spiritual traditions. Matthiessen’s relationship with this belief system is peppered throughout the book, Richardson spent considerable time exploring Matthiessen and Zen Buddhism.
I am certain that Peter Matthiessen would have never been considered for an award of husband of the year or father of the year. He was a philander of the first order seeking women company during all three of his marriages. I found his behaviour appalling, but I would ask why did so many women entertain his infidelity? I asked myself where does all his adulterous behaviour fit in with his dedication to Zen Buddhism? There are several accounts of his children reflecting on their relationship with their father.
In late 2012 Matthiessen was diagnosed with leukemia, he fought the disease but succumbed on April 5, 2014, aged 86
As I turned to the last pages, closed the book and rested it in my lap my mind took me back over the previous days and weeks that Matthiessen had been part of my life. I know some were appalled at the shameful personal decisions he made and the hurt he caused to those close to him. I have recently read much about John Le Carré and George Orwell’s lives and they too were men with wandering emotions and links with other women. Without excusing their behaviour I can still saviour their writing and the pleasure it brings me.
When Matthiessen passed to that heavenly wilderness, I reflected on my own life and like Matthiessen contemplated the successes and failures. Quality biographies should encourage the reader to reflect on their own lives. Matthiessen achieved much but I did ask what hasn’t been achieved? Environmentalists are still in constant battle to preserve what natural landscape is left. Indigenous people are still asking to have their cultures respected. Hopefully readers of this biography will be inspired to continue the efforts of Matthiessen no matter how small those efforts.
July 19, 2025
I received an ARC from the publisher and I had a difficult time reading this book for several reasons. One was that the book was full of typos and missing information like it had not been proofread or fact checked. Another reason was the length of the book which was more than 700 pages of details I wasn’t really interested in. Peter Matthiessen doesn’t come across as a particularly engaging person as he seemed to have a duplicitous personality and was self-centered in his relationships. He wrote for The Paris Review but was working for the CIA at the same time spying on other American writers. He is known for being a nature writer and political activist, and was close friends with writers George Plimpton, William Stryon and Jim Harrison. I was honestly was more interested in William Stryon because he is the most gifted of those writers. Peter Matthiessen won two National Book Awards, whereas Stryon’s awards include a Pulitzer Prize for The Confessions of Nat Turner (which ironically is a banned book) and a long list of awards including Academy Awards for the film adaptation of Sophie’s Choice.
January 8, 2026
It's hard to write a review for this. PM is one of THOSE writers for me; I had an essay published earlier in 2025 about The Snow Leopard and what the wisdom therein had given me. He was a masterful writer--and also, clearly, a real shit of a partner. It's ironic that a devotee of Zen, who ostensibly valued clarity of insight, intention, and action above nearly all else, could be so callous and ignorant about his own behavior and how it devastated the women he claimed to love.
March 20, 2026
Remember that Dos Equis beer commercial about “the most interesting man in the world”? Well my version of that mysterious Mexican guy would be Peter Matthiessen. In fact, if I was to live anyone else’s life, it would likely be PM. This man lived many lives, an explorer, environmental advocate, champion of indigenous rights, writer of beautiful prose, master of zen.
Interesting though how people who preach environmental, political, social justice, can be the same people who are absent or neglectful to their families.
I very much admire PM’s writing, search for meaning, and moral compass scale for all inhabitants of earth. But I certainly hope to be a better partner and father than he was. What makes a man, a good man?
Interesting though how people who preach environmental, political, social justice, can be the same people who are absent or neglectful to their families.
I very much admire PM’s writing, search for meaning, and moral compass scale for all inhabitants of earth. But I certainly hope to be a better partner and father than he was. What makes a man, a good man?
July 29, 2026
Engrossing from start to finish
July 29, 2026
I think this is the best literary biography I have ever read.
December 11, 2025
Loved Peter Matthiessen’s books but found out that I didn’t really like the man. This book is over 690 pages including Notes and pictures. I commend the author, Lance Richardson for his research and the years it took to put this book together. Read “Snow Leopard” instead.
December 10, 2025
The subject of this well-researched and written biography -- Peter Matthiessen -- is such a repugnant, duplicitous, troubled and self-absorbed egomaniac that I had to stop after 3/4 through this work. I couldn't take any more Matthiessen. Matthiessen is a world-class hypocrite: Serial adulterer betraying three wives (one divorced; one dead; one wishes she had died); a life of double-standards. He treats others, especially wives, children, closest friends like shit but feels wounded to the core if confronted by his horrendous behavior in the slightest. Supposedly he was a "brilliant" award-winning nature writer, but he yearned to be known for his fiction was was mostly rubbish. He spent years looking for Big Foot (yes, the Yeti; Big Man; Big Hairy Man) and wrote about his quest in a series of "non-fiction" works. He was a self-righteous "defender " of Indians, our ecology and endangered species, and supposedly a "Zen Buddha monk", yet he worked for the CIA in Paris for several years in the 1950's while forming The Paris Review with George Plimpton, and others. He was born with a silver spoon inserted firmly between his Fisher Island/Fairfield County patrician locked-jaws yet bemoaned his early advantages, life and rich family. Richardson illustrates what was a lifetime of deceptions, ego trips and and self-delusions. I pitied his unloved children and stepchildren who had to deal with this horses ass of a father. Richardson does a good job of recounting all of Matthiessen's delusions and lies...maybe too good a job. Matthiessen isn't someone worth learning to know more about. Period...paragraph. PS. Yeti agrees.
March 30, 2026
I learned Peter Matthiesson is the only writer to have received the National Book Award for fiction and for non-fiction!
i’m giving this a five star review because this is an extraordinarily detailed biography and I think that’s what the author intended. however, I did not find this biography to be easy to read because of the excessive detail. Perhaps I’m a bit more of a casual reader than the intended audience. The first 150 pages are about the wealthy East Coast WASP upbringing of Peter Matthiesson and it bored me.
Peter Matthiesson was a philanderer and could not or would not maintain a monogamous relationship. I would not want to be one of his children, as Matthiesson isn’t portrayed as giving them priority in his life. I have only read Peter Matheson‘s nonfiction books, and reading this biography encourages me to try out some of his fiction.
Sasquatch will live on & on....
i’m giving this a five star review because this is an extraordinarily detailed biography and I think that’s what the author intended. however, I did not find this biography to be easy to read because of the excessive detail. Perhaps I’m a bit more of a casual reader than the intended audience. The first 150 pages are about the wealthy East Coast WASP upbringing of Peter Matthiesson and it bored me.
Peter Matthiesson was a philanderer and could not or would not maintain a monogamous relationship. I would not want to be one of his children, as Matthiesson isn’t portrayed as giving them priority in his life. I have only read Peter Matheson‘s nonfiction books, and reading this biography encourages me to try out some of his fiction.
Sasquatch will live on & on....
December 8, 2025
What a complicated man. I read The Snow Leopard when it came out and was enchanted. Much to admire about PM; for me, not so much to like either. Although I am a Buddhist teacher, his practices and adherence (???) to the precepts greatly differ from mine. Many ways to practice.
September 12, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Knopf, Pantheon, Vintage, and Anchor for an advance copy of this magisterial biography on a true Renaissance man, a writer, an environmentalist, sailor, husband more than once, a Zen master, creator of a literary magazine that is still being published, and an agent for the Central Intelligence Agency, a fully lived life.
Something that has taken me a long time to acknowledge about people is that people are far more complex than I think they are. By complex I guess I just should say human. Capable of doing great things, and some pretty base and horrible things. I tend to put people I know on a pedestal, sometimes on pedestals so high that even the awesome that is Keanu Reeves wouldn't be able to live up to. As a person who reads and enjoys biographies I have become used to finding at most of the people whose work has meant much to me not only have feet of clay, clay that might be further up the body than I expected. People are people, prone to doing things that make sense at the time, maybe driven by thoughts and emotions we can't understand. Unless captured by a biographer who brings the life alive, and offers much to be contemplated, as in this biography. True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson is an all encompassing look at a very complicated man, a man driven by dark thoughts, driven to see and experience life in all its splendor, to write and capture these moments, and never give up trying to understand the world.
Peter Matthiessen was a writer of fiction, which he won awards for, nonfiction, which involved him a very long, long court case, founded a magazine, was a zen master, a husband and father, and agent for the CIA, something that caused him embarrassment when discovered. Matthiessen was born in 1927 not into wealth, but comfort, a comfort as his says kept the worst of the Great Depression away from him while growing up, and gave him many opportunities. Matthiessen spent most of his life trying to figure out his parents and their love, rebelling constantly, getting into trouble, and even having his name removed from the social registry, unsuccessfully. A time in the Navy in a noncombat role bothered him as it never was a chance to prove himself. Matthiessen was married a few times, but found being a parent and husband restrictive, and limiting. A time in Paris helped him found a magazine, one that might have served as cover for his role as an unofficial agent of the CIA. A trip to Nepal gave him a book that secured his name, and also an interest in Yetis. Matthiessen was involved in the American Indian Movement, zen, the environment, and books about lonely men and the world around them. All while constantly looking for something, approval, acceptance, maybe something more.
My introduction to Matthiessen was reading In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a book that really opened my eyes in many ways. Snow Leopard was something that took me longer to discover, but a book I keep going back to just for the style, and the way the narrative seems so cold, but won't let the reader go. I knew a bit about the man, but I did not know about the whole life, and what a life. Matthiessen was a difficult, complex person, a person that Lance Richardson captures perfectly. This is a big book, as merits such a long lived life, but the book never drags, nor seems to bog down. Richardson knows the subject, and has done an incredible amount of research, that really shows. Richardson is not afraid to say we don't know, or will ever know this that, and is willing to share a story from different points of view to get to the truth. Matthiessen comes across not only as a Renaissance man, but a little Machiavellian in some ways also. There are moments, such as what Matthiessen did during his years working for the CIA, how long that might have been. However there is so much more to this man's life, moments that Richardson captures, from zen, to travel, to writing, to well just being Matthiessen.
A biography for those who love big books that examine a life in full, especially for those who like books on complex, that word again, characters. Matthiessen was a gifted writer, and one that I don't think gets the praise he deserves. Snow Leopard, Killing Mister Watson, are real gifts to readers full of lots of amazing lines and ideas. I am very glad Matthiessen had a biographer who not only got him in many ways, but is a very talented writer. This is the first book I have read by Lance Richardson, I can't wait to read more, no matter how long they take.
Something that has taken me a long time to acknowledge about people is that people are far more complex than I think they are. By complex I guess I just should say human. Capable of doing great things, and some pretty base and horrible things. I tend to put people I know on a pedestal, sometimes on pedestals so high that even the awesome that is Keanu Reeves wouldn't be able to live up to. As a person who reads and enjoys biographies I have become used to finding at most of the people whose work has meant much to me not only have feet of clay, clay that might be further up the body than I expected. People are people, prone to doing things that make sense at the time, maybe driven by thoughts and emotions we can't understand. Unless captured by a biographer who brings the life alive, and offers much to be contemplated, as in this biography. True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen by Lance Richardson is an all encompassing look at a very complicated man, a man driven by dark thoughts, driven to see and experience life in all its splendor, to write and capture these moments, and never give up trying to understand the world.
Peter Matthiessen was a writer of fiction, which he won awards for, nonfiction, which involved him a very long, long court case, founded a magazine, was a zen master, a husband and father, and agent for the CIA, something that caused him embarrassment when discovered. Matthiessen was born in 1927 not into wealth, but comfort, a comfort as his says kept the worst of the Great Depression away from him while growing up, and gave him many opportunities. Matthiessen spent most of his life trying to figure out his parents and their love, rebelling constantly, getting into trouble, and even having his name removed from the social registry, unsuccessfully. A time in the Navy in a noncombat role bothered him as it never was a chance to prove himself. Matthiessen was married a few times, but found being a parent and husband restrictive, and limiting. A time in Paris helped him found a magazine, one that might have served as cover for his role as an unofficial agent of the CIA. A trip to Nepal gave him a book that secured his name, and also an interest in Yetis. Matthiessen was involved in the American Indian Movement, zen, the environment, and books about lonely men and the world around them. All while constantly looking for something, approval, acceptance, maybe something more.
My introduction to Matthiessen was reading In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, a book that really opened my eyes in many ways. Snow Leopard was something that took me longer to discover, but a book I keep going back to just for the style, and the way the narrative seems so cold, but won't let the reader go. I knew a bit about the man, but I did not know about the whole life, and what a life. Matthiessen was a difficult, complex person, a person that Lance Richardson captures perfectly. This is a big book, as merits such a long lived life, but the book never drags, nor seems to bog down. Richardson knows the subject, and has done an incredible amount of research, that really shows. Richardson is not afraid to say we don't know, or will ever know this that, and is willing to share a story from different points of view to get to the truth. Matthiessen comes across not only as a Renaissance man, but a little Machiavellian in some ways also. There are moments, such as what Matthiessen did during his years working for the CIA, how long that might have been. However there is so much more to this man's life, moments that Richardson captures, from zen, to travel, to writing, to well just being Matthiessen.
A biography for those who love big books that examine a life in full, especially for those who like books on complex, that word again, characters. Matthiessen was a gifted writer, and one that I don't think gets the praise he deserves. Snow Leopard, Killing Mister Watson, are real gifts to readers full of lots of amazing lines and ideas. I am very glad Matthiessen had a biographer who not only got him in many ways, but is a very talented writer. This is the first book I have read by Lance Richardson, I can't wait to read more, no matter how long they take.
November 22, 2025
Searching for paradise and learning to see it right here now: This was a recurrent theme in Peter Matthiessen’s work. Perhaps it was the dominant theme of his life. from True Nature by Lance Richardson
The Snow Leopard. Sand Rivers. The Cloud Forest. The Tree Where Man Was Born. At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Far Tortuga. Killing Mr. Watson and the following books about Watson. I read these books, passed them on to my brother to read. I knew a little about the man who penned them. I knew his life was varied and interesting.
True Nature delves into Peter Matthiessen’s lifelong search for wholeness and peace. He was driven to travel, leaving his wives and girlfriends and children. His work was important, his books award winners, his causes just. But what he accomplished had a cost, harming those who loved him.
The harm a child suffers does not go away. As the child matures, he or she will either act out their trauma or search to heal the scars and soothe the pain. This was true of Matthiessen, and it was true for his children.
True Nature was a revelation. From his childhood pursuing a study of birds and glorying in nature to his roaming the world searching for the ephemeral, studying Zen in his search for wholeness, to his fight against death, this portrait of Peter Matthiessen is heartbreaking and haunting. His failures as a husband and father were rooted in his restless need to discover and testify.
His search for inner peace and simplicity took him to using LSD and drugs and later to Zen Buddhism. Richardson notes, “He would come to define his restlessness as a search for “what Zen Buddhists call our own ‘true nature’.”
As a boy naturalist he was a bird expert. He felt “unfairly judged and insufficiently love”, acting out in “minor acts of delinquency.” He rejected the values of his well off family. He was a charismatic and attractive young man with a Yale education, studying in Paris, when he met a woman who introduced him to Gurdjieffian philosophy with it’s central goal of being alert to the now and becoming an integrated whole being.
He was approached to join the CIA, and as partly as a cover, he helped to establish The Paris Review. His first novel, Partisans, reflects “the choice Matthiessen made in Paris to reject ideology in favor of his own moral principles.”
His second wife introduced him to Zen which became important to him after her death. He left his grieving son behind for the trip that resulted in The Snow Leopard. Alex later forgave his father knowing that he was unable to “get his own interior straight.” He later married a third time, with one more woman who had to contend with his absences and affairs.
Peter Matthiessen reinvented himself as one of the preeminent “naturalist-writers” in America because he needed the money. from True Nature
He wrote At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga, “the most exhilarating book I’ve ever written,” and considered fiction his true calling. But it was his nonfiction that sold. Nature was a conduit to ultimate truths.
He embraced causes, befriending and writing about activists Cesar Chavez and Leonard Peltier. He was determined to prove that the Yeti existed.
A damaged man, a brilliant man, an abusive man, a man who gave the world stunning works, a man whose search never ended. A man whose life was so complicated and collassial, I have barely touched upon it in this review.
I can’t imagine the work that went into this biography.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
The Snow Leopard. Sand Rivers. The Cloud Forest. The Tree Where Man Was Born. At Play in the Fields of the Lord. Far Tortuga. Killing Mr. Watson and the following books about Watson. I read these books, passed them on to my brother to read. I knew a little about the man who penned them. I knew his life was varied and interesting.
True Nature delves into Peter Matthiessen’s lifelong search for wholeness and peace. He was driven to travel, leaving his wives and girlfriends and children. His work was important, his books award winners, his causes just. But what he accomplished had a cost, harming those who loved him.
The harm a child suffers does not go away. As the child matures, he or she will either act out their trauma or search to heal the scars and soothe the pain. This was true of Matthiessen, and it was true for his children.
True Nature was a revelation. From his childhood pursuing a study of birds and glorying in nature to his roaming the world searching for the ephemeral, studying Zen in his search for wholeness, to his fight against death, this portrait of Peter Matthiessen is heartbreaking and haunting. His failures as a husband and father were rooted in his restless need to discover and testify.
His search for inner peace and simplicity took him to using LSD and drugs and later to Zen Buddhism. Richardson notes, “He would come to define his restlessness as a search for “what Zen Buddhists call our own ‘true nature’.”
As a boy naturalist he was a bird expert. He felt “unfairly judged and insufficiently love”, acting out in “minor acts of delinquency.” He rejected the values of his well off family. He was a charismatic and attractive young man with a Yale education, studying in Paris, when he met a woman who introduced him to Gurdjieffian philosophy with it’s central goal of being alert to the now and becoming an integrated whole being.
He was approached to join the CIA, and as partly as a cover, he helped to establish The Paris Review. His first novel, Partisans, reflects “the choice Matthiessen made in Paris to reject ideology in favor of his own moral principles.”
His second wife introduced him to Zen which became important to him after her death. He left his grieving son behind for the trip that resulted in The Snow Leopard. Alex later forgave his father knowing that he was unable to “get his own interior straight.” He later married a third time, with one more woman who had to contend with his absences and affairs.
Peter Matthiessen reinvented himself as one of the preeminent “naturalist-writers” in America because he needed the money. from True Nature
He wrote At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga, “the most exhilarating book I’ve ever written,” and considered fiction his true calling. But it was his nonfiction that sold. Nature was a conduit to ultimate truths.
He embraced causes, befriending and writing about activists Cesar Chavez and Leonard Peltier. He was determined to prove that the Yeti existed.
A damaged man, a brilliant man, an abusive man, a man who gave the world stunning works, a man whose search never ended. A man whose life was so complicated and collassial, I have barely touched upon it in this review.
I can’t imagine the work that went into this biography.
Thanks to the publisher for a free book.
February 9, 2026
I've heard a couple of negative things about this biography, but those critics seem to be angry at the fact that Richardson did not write a hagiography. Matthiessen is here with most of his faults -- he could be cruel; he was a child of extreme privilege and could almost be a definition of the WASP intellectual; he was wildly unfaithful (had more than a small strain of the misogyny that was part of his generation [NOT an excuse!]); was often an absent father; the CIA period; possessed by his work to the point that he ignored everything else. Matthiessen was very dismissive of the people who showed up for his book signings; I know this from personal experience. But the accomplishment of the man, the artist, the writer is also very clear and completely admirable.
Richardson does what I want my literary biographers to do. Yes, we get the facts of the life, and, yes, we get a good deal of the gossip. But Richardson is very good about the making of the books, the research, the time spent, the struggles of finding a form for each of the books. And then he follows up on each of them with publication stories, reviews, etc. He is also very good about Matthiessen's many expeditions. The preparations and logistics as well as the travails and discomforts. Anyone, like me, who has been a fan of PM's many books (AND even of the minor ones), has always wanted to know these things, to answer: How did he do that? And he also takes Matthiessen's Buddhism very seriously, explains it clearly, and shows how it connects to his overall philosophical quest (the pilgrimage of the subtitle). Richardson makes a strong point for Matthiessen as a Thinker, not simply an advocate or an adventurer, although he was very good at those things, too.
Richardson does what I want my literary biographers to do. Yes, we get the facts of the life, and, yes, we get a good deal of the gossip. But Richardson is very good about the making of the books, the research, the time spent, the struggles of finding a form for each of the books. And then he follows up on each of them with publication stories, reviews, etc. He is also very good about Matthiessen's many expeditions. The preparations and logistics as well as the travails and discomforts. Anyone, like me, who has been a fan of PM's many books (AND even of the minor ones), has always wanted to know these things, to answer: How did he do that? And he also takes Matthiessen's Buddhism very seriously, explains it clearly, and shows how it connects to his overall philosophical quest (the pilgrimage of the subtitle). Richardson makes a strong point for Matthiessen as a Thinker, not simply an advocate or an adventurer, although he was very good at those things, too.
October 25, 2025
In True Nature, Lance Richardson accomplishes something rare and vital: he resurrects not just a man, but a mindset one that bridged literature, wilderness, and spiritual inquiry. Through exhaustive research and luminous storytelling, Richardson traces the paradoxes and passions that defined Peter Matthiessen: CIA agent and mystic, novelist and naturalist, seeker and sinner.
The biography unfolds with both journalistic rigor and spiritual patience, mirroring Matthiessen’s own lifelong quest for meaning. Richardson situates his subject not as a relic of 20th-century literary adventure, but as a prophet of interconnectedness a man who perceived, decades ago, how environmental destruction, social injustice, and spiritual emptiness were threads of the same unraveling fabric.
This is not only the definitive portrait of Matthiessen it’s a meditation on the cost of vision, the collision between art and atonement, and the perilous beauty of pursuing truth to its farthest horizon.
A stunning achievement that belongs among the great literary biographies of our time.
The biography unfolds with both journalistic rigor and spiritual patience, mirroring Matthiessen’s own lifelong quest for meaning. Richardson situates his subject not as a relic of 20th-century literary adventure, but as a prophet of interconnectedness a man who perceived, decades ago, how environmental destruction, social injustice, and spiritual emptiness were threads of the same unraveling fabric.
This is not only the definitive portrait of Matthiessen it’s a meditation on the cost of vision, the collision between art and atonement, and the perilous beauty of pursuing truth to its farthest horizon.
A stunning achievement that belongs among the great literary biographies of our time.
January 31, 2026
For me, this was a really mixed bag. Lance Richardson put together an astounding biography of Peter Matthiessen, thoroughly researched and documented, and the book covers his entire life from a privileged childhood to an adventurous lifestyle. However, if you want to go on liking Peter Matthiessen, you probably shouldn't read this book.
Although there is much to admire about his writing, Matthiessen's life was very flawed--a continuous disloyal husband to all three of his wives and never achieving his great desire to reach enlightenment. His ego and pretentious attitude made it impossible for him to be a true Zen Buddhist even though he practiced it for much of his life. I kept wanting to put the book down and be done with it because it was ruining my opinion of him and The Snow Leopard, but it does offer a very detailed account of his many adventures as a military man, a CIA agent, an explorer, a Native American supporter, and a seeker. Richardson did a great job of portraying a talented but flawed man.
Although there is much to admire about his writing, Matthiessen's life was very flawed--a continuous disloyal husband to all three of his wives and never achieving his great desire to reach enlightenment. His ego and pretentious attitude made it impossible for him to be a true Zen Buddhist even though he practiced it for much of his life. I kept wanting to put the book down and be done with it because it was ruining my opinion of him and The Snow Leopard, but it does offer a very detailed account of his many adventures as a military man, a CIA agent, an explorer, a Native American supporter, and a seeker. Richardson did a great job of portraying a talented but flawed man.
February 18, 2026
True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen is the kind of biography that cuts deeply while revealing the complexity and contradictions of an author for whom I have lifelong admiration. I first “met” Peter Matthiessen through The Snow Leopard while trekking in Nepal in the late 80s. I was inspired and moved by the book’s clear, precise writing, and by its inner turmoil, drive, and spiritual aspiration.
True Nature can feel like a reckoning. The biographer doesn’t protect the myth; instead, he patiently lays out the compromises, contradictions, vanities, and blind spots alongside the discipline, spiritual seriousness, and astonishing drive that made his works possible. What emerges is not a takedown but a harder, more honest kind of reverence: a view of an artist whose “true nature” includes naked grief, ambition, and moral complexity—and whose writing, even when the man falls short, still calls the reader toward attention, humility, and the difficult practice of trying to be better, even if we never fully attain it.
True Nature can feel like a reckoning. The biographer doesn’t protect the myth; instead, he patiently lays out the compromises, contradictions, vanities, and blind spots alongside the discipline, spiritual seriousness, and astonishing drive that made his works possible. What emerges is not a takedown but a harder, more honest kind of reverence: a view of an artist whose “true nature” includes naked grief, ambition, and moral complexity—and whose writing, even when the man falls short, still calls the reader toward attention, humility, and the difficult practice of trying to be better, even if we never fully attain it.
November 14, 2025
Writing a literary biography is a beast. To do it well, an author needs to become an expert in their subject’s work, their life, and the cultural moments and literary movements that shaped them. It’s an all-consuming task that, more often than not, produces the literary equivalent of a whimper – limp, unfocused books that struggle to make an argument for their existence. Not here though. Richardson took on one of the most challenging subjects imaginable, a writer who lived the sort of genre, generation, and globe spanning life no one seems to live anymore, and he made the task look easy. This book is a major accomplishment, and it’s destined to bedevil any writer who aspires to emulate it.
November 16, 2025
I read the Snow Leopard some 40 years ago. It has remained a seminal book in my memory. I have since read a couple of his later works and would give them a so-so. PM was the ultimate child of NE WASP privilege. Always a bit eccentric, a bit of a contrarian, he was free to do wherever his mind lead him. The doors to the NYC, even Paris literary scene, were left wide open. This detailed bio is dense, made possible by the fact that people used to write things down, diaries, letters, etc. Now most of what is left is also word of the day but some passages are worthy of note. I never realized George Plimpton was his good buddy. His affectation with Zen does not interest me, but it’s a choice isn’t it?
July 23, 2025
A gorgeous biography of a brilliant writer and complicated man who devoted his life to the existential quest. I loved how many places this book went -- from the search for Bigfoot to the Everglades to the CIA, from Leonard Peltier to the Himalayas and Zen. I'm not sure I would have liked Matthiessen as a father or partner, but I deeply admire his work and writing, and especially the ecological and other justice issues he foretold. And from a fellow restless seeker, and journalist, I learned from Matthiessen and his pilgrimage that sometimes you have to start with what's right in front of you. Thank you for the gift of this book.
May 28, 2026
A thorough review of his life
Richardson has produced perhaps the definitive review of his life. You learn many details about his childhood and youth and his years at university and then Paris. Most interesting to me was the detail with which his writing process is described for each of his books. How long his revisions took especially the saga of his magnum opus, Shadow Country. Any aspiring author would learn a lot from reading this biography. If anything is given a light touch it is his family life. yes it is there yet perhaps this element of his life will best be captured if one of his children write a memoir.
Richardson has produced perhaps the definitive review of his life. You learn many details about his childhood and youth and his years at university and then Paris. Most interesting to me was the detail with which his writing process is described for each of his books. How long his revisions took especially the saga of his magnum opus, Shadow Country. Any aspiring author would learn a lot from reading this biography. If anything is given a light touch it is his family life. yes it is there yet perhaps this element of his life will best be captured if one of his children write a memoir.
November 6, 2025
Having access to Matthiessen's correspondence allowed the author to create a perfect biography. Following a man who lived many lives during his 86 years of intense traveling, writing, and spiritual exploration, "True Nature" could very well be a puff piece. Instead, the book expands the story by adding the (candid and critical) perspective of the people that lived close to Matthiessen during his journey. It's a great read for fans of the writer as much for those who never heard about him.
July 21, 2026
Richardson did a good job of this biography. The problem is more with the life itself - Matthiessen was certainly talented and lived an interesting life, but the overwhelming selfishness, immaturity, and fickleness displayed by PM throughout his life made this book hard to enjoy.
Still thankful for his literary works, but some authors are best left unbiographed. This felt like it might've been one of those.
Still thankful for his literary works, but some authors are best left unbiographed. This felt like it might've been one of those.
November 23, 2025
An incredible undertaking on indeed, a man of many lives. I am no reviewer… but Lance Richardson is quite the biographer who discovers his subjects interior worlds in unexpected ways. He navigates the complexity of Matthieson (the man was no saint) with a deft sensitivity - a truly compelling biography.
February 1, 2026
A very impressive work of scholarship about a remarkable individual who produced s prodigious amount of excellent fiction and non fiction. A very driven person, traumatized by his upbringing, neglectful, promiscuous parents, from whom he learned nothing, repeating their mistakes in terms of his own three wives and his children. A life of fleeing responsibility to pursue his latest project.
February 16, 2026
If you like Peter Matthiessen's books (like I do), I advise you not to read his biography. Honestly I gave up halfway through. He comes across as quite a despicable human being and the book goes into way too much detail. Any book over 250 pages has to justify its length and this book, though well written, does not.
March 17, 2026
This book is an amazing accomplishment by the author. Peter Matthiessen was fascinating , complex, tough, likeable and unlikeable. The amount of research that went into this work is enormous. Sometimes I struggled working my way through 600 pages
In the end it was well worth the effort. If it is possible I felt I actually knew Peter Matthiessen, if that is possible.
Dan H.
In the end it was well worth the effort. If it is possible I felt I actually knew Peter Matthiessen, if that is possible.
Dan H.
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