For the next few years Matthiessen worked as a commercial fisherman, scalloping and clamming during the spring and fall. "I don't think I could have done my writing without the fishing. I needed something physical, something non-intellectual."
2 In 1954, his first novel, Race Rock, was published. Written in the Conradian tradition, it traced the coming of age of upper-middle-class Americans on the New England coast. The five characters struggle with the tension between primitive vitality and the burden of tradition. The following year, Viking published Partisans, an adventure story about an American journalist's encounter with Parisian working-class life. The novel reflected liberal disillusion with Communism.
By 1957 Matthiessen was single again and for the next five years wandered about the world, traveling the backwoods of the Americas from Point Barrow to Tierra del Fuego.
His first nonfiction work, Wildlife in America, is an exhaustive survey of the white man's effect on the wildlife of North America. It garnered high critical acclaim and established Matthiessen as a gifted naturalist-writer. "I have always been a student of natural history and wild animal behavior, and the anatomy of the universe. My interest is pragmatic on the one hand ...
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