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Writer on the Wild Side
- Abstract
Most of the old lions and the ambitious strivers after lionhood—Bellow, Updike, Cheever, Styron, Mailer—are gone. A single writer on the long side of 80 who might be considered a major figure remains. But Peter Matthiessen has never known the acclaim that attended the careers of his contemporaries. He has merely worked with unrelenting devotion to his craft and art during a span of 60 years, producing 19 books of nonfiction, mostly accounts of travels to the wild places of the earth or polemics for liberal causes, and 10 books of fiction, including nine novels and one collection of short stories.
That the splash he has made is comparatively modest does not mean he has gone unnoticed. Six of his books were serialized in the New Yorker, which generously funded much of his wanderlust; some of his work has risen to the top of the bestseller lists; high honors have not been slow to come his way. The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972), which relates his adventures among the wildlife of Kenya and Tanzania, was nominated for a National Book Award; The Snow Leopard (1978), which tells of a 250 mile trek across the Himalayas and his coming to terms with the death of his second wife, won it. Among his novels, At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965), about a half-breed North American Indian who parachutes into a South American wilderness and is greeted as a god by a primitive tribe, was nominated for it; Shadow Country (2008), about the dark and bloody life and death of an aspirant to backwoods empire in the Everglades, won it.
About the Author
Algis Valiunas writes on culture and politics for COMMENTARY and other magazines. His "Goethe’s Magnificent Self" appeared in January.
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