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...