Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World, Trying to Escape Himself

"On November 20, 1959, at a pier in Brooklyn, the writer Peter Matthiessen boarded the M.V. Venimos, a freighter bound for Iquitos, a port town deep in the Peruvian Amazon. He was fresh off the publication of "Wildlife in America," a travelogue-cum-polemic that lavished attention on the endangered species of North America, indicted the humans who had destroyed their habitats, and established Matthiessen as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir."

"Matthiessen liked peril; one could even say he courted it. In the course of a long literary career, during which he wrote thirty-three books and was celebrated for both his fiction and his nonfiction, he travelled to places most writers would never dare to go. He flew through thick fog across the Bering Sea in pursuit of musk oxen. He accompanied a crew of Caymanian turtle hunters on a barely seaworthy schooner. He roamed solo across the Serengeti, dodging predators and scrutinizing dead prey."

"Most memorably, in 1973, he accompanied the famed field biologist George Schaller on a late-autumn hike in the Dolpo Mountains of Nepal. Schaller was looking for rare Himalayan blue sheep; Matthiessen was looking for enlightenment, which he compared to the elusive snow leopard, sensed but seldom seen. The book that resulted from this trip, "The Snow Leopard" (1978), won Matthiessen the first of two National Book Awards."

Peter Matthiessen traveled to remote and dangerous places in pursuit of wildlife, human stories, and spiritual insight. He boarded the M.V. Venimos in 1959 bound for Iquitos after publishing Wildlife in America, a polemic on endangered North American species and habitat destruction. He wrote thirty-three books and achieved acclaim in both fiction and nonfiction. He pursued musk oxen across the Bering Sea, joined Caymanian turtle hunters, roamed the Serengeti, and in 1973 accompanied George Schaller in Nepal’s Dolpo Mountains seeking blue sheep and the elusive snow leopard. The Snow Leopard (1978) earned him a National Book Award. His work blended conservation advocacy and empathy for neglected people and places while reflecting an underlying inner crisis.

Read at The New Yorker