Peter matthiessen cia
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A novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and Zen teacher, Peter Matthiessen was a true “literary lion” of 20th Century American literature - writing over thirty books during his six-decade career. The only author to win the prestigious National Book Award for both the fiction and non-fiction, his poetic explorations of wild places and Indigenous people, as well as his novels, were often set in far-flung locales featuring characters on the edges of civilization.
Born on May 22, 1927 into a family of wealth and privilege in New York City, Peter Matthiessen was the son of an architect and spokesman for both the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy. At a young age, he developed a love of animals that would later influence his career as a naturalist. Serving in the U.S. Navy from 1945-47, he attended Yale University and the Sorbonne in Paris - later moving to the city where he briefly worked for the C.I.A. and founded the literary journal The Paris Review with childhood friend George Plimpton. There, Matthiessen spent time with other expatriate Amer
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Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 - April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was a 2008 National Book Award winner. He was also a prominent environmental activist. His nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978) and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction was adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name. In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume, 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that had been published in the 1990s. According to critic Michael Dirda, "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, s
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F. O. Matthiessen
American academic (1902–1950)
F. O. Matthiessen | |
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Matthiessen (right) with Russell Cheney, Normandy, summer 1925 | |
| Born | Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-02-19)February 19, 1902 Pasadena, California, US |
| Died | April 1, 1950(1950-04-01) (aged 48) Boston, Massachusetts, US |
| Resting place | Springfield Cemetery, Springfield, Massachusetts |
| Alma mater | Yale, Oxford and Harvard |
| Occupation(s) | Historian, literary critic, educator |
| Known for | American Renaissance |
| Partner | Russell Cheney |
| Awards | DeForest and Alpheus Henry Snow Prizes, Rhodes Scholarship |
Francis Otto Matthiessen (February 19, 1902 – April 1, 1950) was an educator, scholar, and literary critic, influential in the fields of American literature and American studies.[1] His best known work, American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman, celebrated the achievements of several 19th-century American authors and had a profound impact on a generation of scholars. It also established American Renaissance as the common t
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