True Nature - by Lance Richardson (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a visionary writer and thinker, was a person of myriad contradictions. After his teenage demand that his name be removed from the Social Register, Matthiessen nonetheless attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, working for the CIA and founding the now famous literary magazine The Paris Review with George Plimpton; he then made his living as a fisherman on Long Island while becoming a writer, whose promising early fiction (garnering him invitations to drinks with top New York editors) soon existed alongside such works as his now-classic Wildlife in America (1959), arguably the first significant "environmental writing," before that movement and category even existed (with its damning of white colonizers, too, before that was the norm). His pursuit of spiritual and cultural understandings took him to the far-flung and diverse horizons, from his famous "Snow Leopard" journey in the Himalayas to his travels with biologists in the Serengeti, his canoeing through rapids in the Amazon in search of a Miocene-epoch fossil, his embedding with the Hadza people in Tanzania, his lifelong battle to get justice for the wrongly accused Native American prisoner Leonard Peltier. Meanwhile, Matthiessen, a sensitive champion of people's rights, was a philanderer and an inattentive father; he was an ever unsatisfied seeker yet a devoted practitioner and teacher of Zen. Episodes in this amazing life are given page-turning immediacy by the brilliant Lance Richardson, who reveals throughout the ways that Matthiessen's uncanny gifts and drive toward his subject matter allowed him to discover deeper connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation, between the Vietnam war and political corruption-to see clearly, so far ahead of his time and ours, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge.""--

Book Synopsis

PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST - NAMED A NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST - A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER AND VOGUE - The first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement, by award-winning writer Lance Richardson.

"A stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen." --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus

"A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative." --Pico Iyer, Air Mail

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege--as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York Social Register--he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions: floating through the Amazon to recover a prehistorical fossil; embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea; swimming with sharks off the coast of Australia. His novels, inspired by his travels, were unclassifiable meditations about Caymanian turtle hunters and frontier outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his nonfiction became legendary: nature books like Wildlife in America--"key parts of the canon of emergent environmental writing," says Bill McKibben--as well as advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, and Native American land claims.

Underlying all Matthiessen's disparate pursuits was the same existential search--to find a cure for "deep restlessness." This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, Lance Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, Richardson depicts Matthiessen's life with page-turning immediacy, while also illuminating how the writer's uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism, and labor exploitation--to express, eloquently and presciently, that "in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge."

Review Quotes

One of Library Journal's Most Anticipated Fall Books
One of the Washington Post's Anticipated Fall Books
One of Garden & Gun's Fall Reading List and Favorite Books of 2025
One of Alta Journal's Most Anticipated Autumn Book Releases

"If a cat has 9 lives, Matthiessen seemed to have 29. . . . Lance Richardson . . . tracks his elusive prey along every uneven path with heroic thoroughness. . . . A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative." --Pico Iyer, Air Mail​

"Matthiessen's many masks are on display in True Nature, a deeply researched and artfully executed biography. . . . Mr. Richardon's explication of [his subject's] sui generis novels is astute and highly welcome. . . . Readers will leave True Nature with an enriched appreciation for Matthiessen." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

"Beautifully written, insightful, and engaging, True Nature is a tour de force depiction of a charismatic, restless, self-absorbed, immensely talented literary lion." --Glenn C. Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

"Elegant and rigorous. . . . Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. . . . Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson." --John Kaag, The Atlantic

"A magnificent literary biography, painstakingly researched, intricately organized, and beautifully written, fully worthy of its sensitive, restless, and driven subject. . . . It should be of interest to anyone drawn to the search for our true nature and the deepest truths of the human heart." --David Guy, Tricycle

"True Nature is enthralling, expertly told, and based on extraordinary research." --Michael O'Donnell, American Scholar

"Top-notch: sensitive, probing, admiring but never fawning, and exhaustively researched." -- Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun

"Richardson's fine-toothed research establishes Peter's importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography--which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it." --Terry McDonell, Alta

"I loved Lance Richardson's True Nature, perhaps all the more because I was getting to know both Matthiessen and his writing from this terrifically absorbing chronicle. . . . A biographer aims both to attract new readers and to satisfy hardcore fans, a near-impossible feat that Richardson deftly achieves." --Megan Marshall, Lit Hub

"Richardson is an accomplished storyteller. . . . True Nature is beautifully written, generous, but also uncompromising, and Richardson handles the complexities with insight and grace. One of the pleasures . . . is that [this] is also a book about the craft of writing [and] the solitary writer's search for le mot juste." --Scott Chaskey, The East Hampton Star

"This is a brilliant biography, bristling with ground-clearing primary-source research, filled with every findable fact about this writer, and, in an added twist as rare as it's welcome, written with serious narrative flair." --Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

"Impressive . . . A rigorous and balanced account of this restless soul. . . . Richardson shows how Matthiessen's devotion to writing never wavered. In the process, he reveals the many sides (to quote Matthiessen's own editor) of 'an immensely complicated, neurotic, charming, iron-willed, uncertain, demanding author.'" --Guy Stagg, The Spectator
​​
"Capacious . . . Richardson's carefully cross-hatched study of his subject depicts him in the wild, in all habitats and seasons. . . . A very considerable American life." --Stephen Smith, Financial Times

"A comprehensive, compelling life of a man of many parts." --Kirkus Reviews

"The first biography of the writer, and an engaging one at that . . . grounded in remarkably candid interviews with Matthiessen's family members and lovers." --Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker

"Richardson writes movingly of the melding of ecology and divinity in Matthiessen's literary work, and of his years of activism. The result is a touching, unsparing, and fully rendered portrait of a complex figure of 20th-century literature." --Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"True Nature is a magnificent achievement: an immense work of scholarship, synthesis and empathy, written throughout with verve and lucidity, which illuminates one of the most fascinating writerly lives of the past century." --Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland and Is a River Alive?

"Naturalist, novelist, Yeti-hunter, CIA agent--Peter Matthiessen led an exceptional life, and Lance Richardson does a wonderful job capturing it in all its complexity. True Nature is generous and sensitive, but at the same time clear-eyed about its outsized subject." --Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

"A riveting account of the tumultuous, untamed, yet determinedly focused life of Peter Matthiessen, a writer of planetary greatness. A superb nature writer, an uncompromising social and environmental activist, a devotee of Zen's endless path toward transformation, and by all accounts a failure as a proper family man, Matthiessen has been gifted with an excellent biographer in Lance Richardson, whose True Nature approaches this life with a Zen-like quality of calm, gratitude, and expansiveness all its own." --Joy Williams, winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

"True Nature is a stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen--portraying the man in all his maddening complexities. And what a journey: founding The Paris Review, working undercover for the CIA, Zen master, chasing the snow leopard in the Himalayas. This intimate and gracefully written biography is absolutely enthralling." --Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus

"Lance Richardson brilliantly captures Peter Matthiessen's 'pathological restlessness' in this taut, propulsive, and riveting tale of a legendary life. We are with Matthiessen as he co-founds The Paris Review in postwar Europe, joins and leaves the CIA, explores the Amazon, treks through the Himalayas, and becomes a Zen master--all while writing the books that would help launch the environmental movement. Drawing on Matthiessen's private papers and hundreds of interviews, Richardson creates an extraordinary portrait of an elusive writer who sought to protect the world's last wild places. There is adventure, beauty, compassion, and deep insight on nearly every page. Compellingly crafted, doggedly researched, and elegantly written, True Nature is a true masterpiece of literary biography." --Heather Clark, author of New York Times Top Ten Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

"Brooding, sexy, troubled Peter Matthiessen, one of America's last great WASP renegades, has had the immense posthumous luck of finding an ideal biographer in Lance Richardson, who patiently and artfully dissects a difficult life and a body of work that evades easy description. Matthiessen emerges from this book as an unexpected radical, an underappreciated Modernist, and a pioneering environmentalist. I can't imagine that a fairer, better researched, more elegant biography will come out this year." --Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag

"Comprehensive, deeply researched and lucidly written, this is the definitive biography of a complicated, fascinating and sometimes exasperating man." --Adam Sisman, author of John le Carre The Biography

"Peter Matthiessen was a restless seeker after the secrets of the universe--in nature, in psychedelic drugs, in Zen. And he kept many secrets of his own--Paris Review colleagues didn't know he worked for the CIA; wives didn't know how many lovers he had. Haunted by privilege, he seemed most comfortable where he least fit in, exhilarated by friction and difficulty, often created by his own Melvillean appetites. In his writing, he could make contradictions cohere and even bend reality to his tenacious gift. Lance Richardson, likewise, shapes the story of this wounded, angry, charismatic man into an irresistible portrait, alive with twentieth-century counterculture ideals that burned with hope and then burned out. Some of Matthiessen's books read like an elegy to the planet, and this biography reads like an elegy to the last of the cool WASP men. It's quite a story." --Katherine Bucknell, author of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

"A nuanced account of the brilliant, driven, complicated man who gave us The Snow Leopard. Peter Matthiessen was always seeking something bigger, something more profound. And this wonderful biography echoes that ambition and questing spirit. Perceptive and consistently readable." --Cal Flyn, international bestselling author of Islands of Abandonment

About the Author

LANCE RICHARDSON's first book, House of Nutter The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors' Choice and named one of the notable titles of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including a year-long residency at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.