Peter Matthiessen Summary

Peter Matthiessen is widely considered one of the most important wilderness writers of the twentieth century. In fiction and nonfiction alike, he explores endangered natural environments and human cul... Read more

Peter Matthiessen's increasingly substantial reputation as a novelist rests firmly on two remarkable books. Although he wrote three promising early novels, his two best-known works of fiction are sure... Read more

While Peter Matthiessen's publications include several well-received novels, his reputation as a writer rests largely on his nonfiction nature books, which passionately yet scientifically document the... Read more

Critical Essay by Paul Zweig Peter Matthiessen is one of the important wilderness writers of our time. His The Tree Where Man Was Born … is a masterpiece of understated prose and exacting desc... Read more

Critical Essay by Terrence Des Pres The best places are not on any map, or so Melville once remarked, and Peter Matthiessen would surely agree…. Most of his work has grown from first-hand expe... Read more

Critical Essay by Leonard Michaels Most impressively dramatic [in The Snow Leopard] is Matthiessen's account of [his] passage through the Himalayas. In images that are intensely kinesthetic as... Read more

Critical Essay by Donald Hall For a long time, [Matthiessen's] writing has been vigorous, metaphoric, exact, luminous, coherent, and resolved. If one sensed that something was lacking, one did... Read more

Critical Essay by John Thompson Far back upstream, so very far back in the jungles of the Amazon headwaters that not even an anthropologist has visited them, live the Indians of Peter Matthiessen�... Read more

Critical Essay by John Hay [The Shorebirds of North America] is one of the finest books of natural history that I have ever seen, regardless of its qualities as an ornithological text, which are cons... Read more

Critical Essay by James Forest [In Sal Si Puedes Peter Matthiessen] prefers the typewriter equivalent of the cinema verité, shoulder-held camera approach over the rehearsed, Mennen-deodorized,... Read more

Critical Essay by William Styron [The essay from which this excerpt is taken originally appeared in 1979 as an introduction to Peter Matthiessen, A Bibliography: 1951–1979, compiled by D. Nich... Read more

Critical Essay by Jim Harrison "Sand Rivers" is a strange, bittersweet, autumnal book based on a safari into the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, one of the last great wilderne... Read more

Critical Essay by Edward Weeks [Peter Matthiessen] is by intention a tight writer: he begins with a situation of tension and screws it to a higher pitch. This is his device in his first novel, Race R... Read more

Critical Essay by Christopher Lehmann-haupt In a letter of his own that he quotes in his latest nonfiction work, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," Peter Matthiessen describes the case he ... Read more

Critical Essay by Roderick Nordell Even when Peter Matthiessen writes the text in a book full of photographs ("The Tree Where Man Was Born," with Eliot Porter's pictures of Afric... Read more

Critical Essay by Wilcomb E. Washburn Mix together the following ingredients: a threatened natural environment, endangered plants and animals, and Indians resisting change, and you have the formula f... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Nabokov During the past eight years Peter Matthiessen has returned from his travels in Africa or Nepal to discover a hidden network of native American states of mind and place... Read more

Critical Essay by James Finn In Partisans many of the situations … seem contrived…. [Too] often [the] characters do not merely express or even embody the ideas they discuss; they are... Read more

Critical Essay by Terry Southern [In Raditzer we find] a character distinct from those in literature, yet one who has somehow figured, if but hauntingly, in the lives of us all. It is, in certain way... Read more

Critical Essay by Loren Eiseley ["Under the Mountain Wall," a] sensitively written book by Peter Matthiessen, is an engrossing human document that sheds light on the story of man, stone... Read more