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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 surely At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), a rich surrealistic panorama of civilization and savagery, innocence and depravity among the primitive Indians of the Amazon, and Far Tortuga (1975), a graphically and stylistically experimental work about an ill-fated Caribbean turtle-fishing boat and its doomed crew.
Remarkable as Matthiessen's fiction is, many critics feel that his greatest achievement is as a naturalist and nature writer. Out of twenty-five years of traveling in remote areas he has produced meticulously observed, often poetically written books and articles on a range of topics--American wildlife, shore birds, the wilds of South America, a war tribe of New Guinea, life on an arctic island, and the fastnesses of East Africa. His travel writings are all characterized by an attempt to present natural and human subjects that are strange, remote, and alien and to do so with fidelity to detail but with a fluid, sometimes rich style that brings out the beauty in rough, often crude, subjects.
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