Peter Matthiessen is among a handful of American authors to be nominated for the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction--for the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) and the travel books The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972) and The Snow Leopard (1978; for which he won the award). His tour de force novel Far Tortuga (1975) stands as a major achievement of technical virtuosity and symbolic resonance, an experimentalist landmark in the modernist tradition of Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner. His personal chronicle of Himalayan adventure and discovery, The Snow Leopard, has become a classic travel book.

Far Tortuga and The Snow Leopard, the pinnacles of Matthiessen's career thus far, rise above a body of work distinguished by its quantity, breadth, commitment, and style. Just below them are the novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Killing Mister Watson (1990), the...