Peter Matthiessen Books In Order

Watson trilogy Books In Order

  1. Killing Mr. Watson (1990)
  2. Lost Man’s River (1997)
  3. Bone by Bone (1999)
  4. Shadow Country (2008)

Novels

  1. Race Rock (1954)
  2. Partisans (1955)
  3. Raditzer (1961)
  4. At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965)
  5. Far Tortuga (1975)
  6. In Paradise (2014)

Collections

  1. On the River Styx (1989)
  2. The Peter Matthiessen Reader (2000)

Non fiction

  1. Wildlife in America (1959)
  2. The Cloud Forest (1961)
  3. Under the Mountain Wall (1962)
  4. Blue Meridian (1971)
  5. Sal Si Puedes (1972)
  6. The Tree Where Man Was Born (1972)
  7. The Wind Birds (1973)
  8. The Snow Leopard (1978)
  9. Sand Rivers (1981)
  10. 1000 Adventures (1983)
  11. In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983)
  12. Indian Country (1984)
  13. Men’s Lives (1986)
  14. Nine-Headed Dragon River (1986)
  15. Peter Matthiessen Interview with Kay Bonetti (1987)
  16. African Silences (1991)
  17. Baikal (1992)
  18. Shadows of Africa (1992)
  19. Red and Blue Days (1993)
  20. East of Lo Monthang (1995)
  21. Zen and the Writing Life (1999)
  22. Tigers in the Snow (2000)
  23. The Birds of Heaven (2001)
  24. End of the Earth (2003)
  25. An African Trilogy (2012)
  26. Selous in Africa (2016)

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Peter Matthiessen Books Overview

Killing Mr. Watson

By the author of ‘The Snow Leopard’, ‘The Tree Where Man Was Born’ and ‘On the River Styx’, this novel is based around the circumstances of the death of a man in Florida 1910, who had terrorized his community in the Florida Everglades. It explores whether it was murder, exorcism or sacrifice.

Lost Man’s River

In this darkly compelling drama of fathers and sons, land and rapacity, murder, honor, and revenge, an ‘extraordinarily accomplished writer’ ‘Philadelphia Inquirer’ returns to the primeval landscape of the Florida Everglades, the setting of his bestselling ‘Killing Mister Watson’.

Bone by Bone

Peter Matthiessen is one of America’s most respected writers and one of the very few National Book Award winners nominated for both fiction and nonfiction. Bone by Bone is arguably his finest novel. Although it stands alone, it is also the capstone of the Watson trilogy, which has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle Book Review as ‘one of the grand projects of contemporary literature.’ In the critically acclaimed Killing Mister Watson, Peter Matthiessen brilliantly re created the life of the legendary E. J. Watson, who was gunned down by a posse of fearful neighbors before World War I. In his masterful sequel, Lost Man’s River, Matthiessen returned us to the lawless frontier of the Florida Everglades, where Watson’s son Lucius sought to untangle the knot of truth and lies surrounding his notorious father and his strange death. And now, in Bone by Bone, the story unfolds in its final form, in the voice of the enigmatic Mister Watson himself. From his early days as an impoverished child of the Reconstruction era, through the unjust loss of his inherited plantation, to his bloody death in front of his loving wife and children, E. J. Watson was capable of vision and ingenuity, mercy and courage, and sudden, astonishing violence. He was an entrepreneurial sugarcane farmer in the uncharted waterways of the Everglades, an exile in the Indian territories, a devoted father, and, allegedly, the killer of numerous men. He was forced to flee home and family time after time. In Bone by Bone, Peter Matthiessen has accomplished the writer’s ultimate challenge: He has laid bare the humanity at the heart of a dangerous and controversial figure and, in doing so, has added to our understanding of the abiding mystery of human nature.

Shadow Country

2008 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNERPeter Matthiessen’s great American epic Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man s River, and Bone by Bone was conceived as one vast mysterious novel, but because of its length it was originally broken up into three books. In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son. Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson s wife observed, ‘still casts its shadow over the nation.’Peter Matthiessen s lyrical and illuminating work in the Watson narrative has been praised highly by such contemporaries as Saul Bellow, William Styron, and W. S. Merwin. Joseph Heller said ‘I read it in great gulps, up each night later than I wanted to be, in my hungry impatience to find out more and more.’ Praise for Shadow Country Shadow Country is altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature. This magnificent, sad masterpiece about race, history, and defeated dreams can easily stand comparison with Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. Little wonder, too, that parts of the story of E.J. Watson call up comparisons with Dostoevsky, Conrad, and, inevitably, Faulkner. In every way, Shadow Country is a bravura performance, at once history, fiction, and myth as well as the capstone to the career of one of the most admired and admirable writers of our time. The New York Review of Books Magnificent and capacious . I’ll just say right here that the book took my sleeve and like the ancient mariner would not let go. Matthiessen has made his three part saga into a new thing . Finally now we have these books welded like a bell, and with Watson’s song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate .a breathtaking saga. The Los Angeles Times Gorgeously written and unfailingly compelling, Shadow Country is the exhilarating masterwork of Matthiessen s career, every bit as ambitious as Moby Dick. National Geographic Adventure magazine Peter Mattiessen consolidates his epic masterpiece of Florida and crafts something even better He deserves credit for decades of meticulous research and obsessive details and soaring prose that converted the Watson legend into critically acclaimed literature . Anyone wanting an explanation for what happened to Florida can now find it in a single novel, a great American novel. Miami Herald Matthiessen is writing about one man’s life in Shadow Country, but he is also writing about the life of the nation over the course of half a century. Watson’s story is essentially the story of the American frontier, of the conquering of wild lands and people, and of what such empires cost . Even among a body of work as magnificent as Matthiessen’s, this is his great book. St. Petersburg Times Shadow Country is a magnum opus. Matthiessen is meticulous in creating characters, lyrical in describing landscapes, and resolute in dissecting the values and costs that accompanied the development of this nation. Seattle Times Shadow Country is an ambitious, lasting, and meaningful work of literature that will not soon fade away. It is a testament to Mr. Matthiessen s integrity as an artist that he felt compelled to return to the Watson material to produce this work and satisfy his original vision .a multifaceted work that can be read variously or simultaneously as a psychological novel, a historical novel, a morality tale, a political allegory, or a mystery. East Hampton Star Matthiessen s Watson trilogy is a touchstone of modern American literature this reworking is remarkable . Where Watson was a magnificent character before, he comes across as nothing short of iconic here; it s difficult to find another figure in American literature so thoroughly and confincingly portrayed. Publishers Weekly, starred review, Pick of the Week Matthiessen has reinvigorated and rejoined the trilogy s novels a mosaic about the life and lynch mob death of a turn of the century Florida Everglades sugar planter and serial killer named E. J. Watson into the 900 plus page Shadow Country. This is no mere repackaging: Four hundred pages were cut from the novels, previous background characters now tromp to the foreground, and the books rangy, Faulknerian essence is rendered more digestible. Deliciously digestible, that is; this is a thick porterhouse of a novel. Men s Journal ‘The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyone’s highest expectations for great writing.’ Richard Ford ‘Peter Matthiessen is a brilliantly gifted and ambitious writer, an inspired anatomist of the American mythos. His storytelling skills are prodigious and his rapport with his subject is remarkable.’ Joyce Carol Oates’Peter Matthiessen’s work, both in fiction and non fiction, has become a unique achievement in his own generation and in American literature as a whole. Everything that he has written has been conveyed in his own clear, deeply informed, elegant and powerful prose. The Watson saga in the round, to which he has devoted nearly thirty years, is his crowning achievement. Shadow Country, his distillation of the earlier trilogy, is his transmutation of it to represent his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy.’ W.S. MerwinFrom the Hardcover edition.

At Play in the Fields of the Lord

In a malarial outpost in the South American rain forest, two misplaced gringos converge and clash. Martin Quarrier has come to convert the fearful and elusive Niaruna Indians to his brand of Christianity. Lewis Moon, a stateless mercenary who is himself part Indian, has come to kill them on behalf of the local comandante. Out of their struggle, Peter Matthiessen has created an electrifying moral thriller, a novel of Conradian richness that explores both the varieties of spiritual experience and the politics of cultural genocide.

Far Tortuga

An adventure story and a deeply considered meditation upon the sea itself.

On the River Styx

Mr. Matthiessen proves himself here to be a connoisseur of coiled tensions, between men and women, between people of different social clas*ses, and, repeatedly, between races…
. There is something almost mysterious about his achievement…
qualities for which one can think of only classical or old fashioned words: gravitas, grandeur, beauty.’ The New York Times

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award winning The Snow Leopard.

This stunning collection of shot stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most acclaimed literary voices of our time.

‘These compelling tales of elemental fear and ever pressing silence culminate in the great, dark and desperate final story, a masterful piece of work by one of our best writers.’ Don DeLillo

‘Simply wonderful stories. When all the faddish smoke clears. Peter Matthiessen’s work will stand revealed as that of an artist of immense talent, grandeur, and genius.’ Jim Harrison

The Peter Matthiessen Reader

‘Our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition.’ The New York Times Book Review

‘Matthiessen is a great travel companion…
. His knowledge of plants, animals and people is breathtaking.’ The Boston Globe

Perhaps no writer has better articulated our relationship to the environment than Peter Matthiessen. From Wildlife in America to Men’s Lives, his work has captured the wonder of the natural world and the horrors of resource exploitation, with its violent effects on traditional peoples and the poor.

In The Peter Matthiessen Reader, editor McKay Jenkins presents a single volume collection of this distinguished author’s nonfiction. Here are essays and excerpts that highlight the spiritual, literary, and political daring so crucial to Matthiessen’s vision. Matthiessen chronicles his 250 mile trek across the Himalaya to the Tibetan Plateau in a selection from the National Book Award winner The Snow Leopard. Wild peoples, wilderness, and wildlife common themes throughout Matthiessen’s oeuvre are examined with grace and power in The Tree Where Man Was Born. Here too are excerpts from Indian Country and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen’s stunning expos of the Leonard Peltier case and the ongoing conflict between the U.S. government and the American Indian Movement. Comprehensive and engrossing, The Peter Matthiessen Reader celebrates an American voice unequaled in its commitment to literature’s noblest aspiration: to challenge us to perceive our world as well as ourselves truthfully and clearly.

Wildlife in America

This classic history of the rare, threatened, and extinct animals of North America is a dramatic chronicle of man’s role in the disappearance of great and small species of our land. ‘Should be the number one source volume for everyone who embraces the philosophy of conservation.’ Roger Tory Peterson. Illustrations throughout.

The Cloud Forest

For twenty thousand miles, Peter Matthiessen crisscrossed the South American wilderness, traveling from the Amazonian rain forests to Machu Picchu high in the Andes, down to the edge of the world at Tierra del Fuego and back. In the course of his journey, he followed the trails of old explorers; encountered river bandits, wild tribesmen, and the evidence of ancient ruins; and discovered a fossilized snout of a giant unknown crocodile hidden in the depths of the jungle on the wild mountain rivers of Peru. Filled with observations and descriptions of the people and the fading wildlife of this vast world to the south, The Cloud Forest is Matthiessen’s incisive, wry report of his expedition into some of the last and most exotic wild terrains in the world.

Under the Mountain Wall

In the Baliem Valley in central New Guinea lived a Stone Age tribe which survived into the twentieth century the Kurelu. Matthiessen joined the Harvard Peabody Expedition of 1961 which set out to study the tribe as unobtrusively as possible, living among the Kurelu for two seasons. The result was this classic account, not of the expedition but of a lost culture; the Kurelu’s timeless rhythms of work and play, of warriorship, feasting and funerals. In ‘Under the Mountain Wall‘, Matthiessen illuminates the lives of the Kurelu’s with respect and sympathy, capturing a culture untouched by civilisation and vanishing along with the wilderness lying beneath the dramatic peaks of the Snow Mountains.

Blue Meridian

In 1969 Peter Matthiessen set out with the expedition led by Peter Gimpel, whose aim was to find and film the great white shark. Acting as the expedition’s chronicler and spare hand both on the surface and below, Matthiessen accompanied the crew from the Caribbean to the whaling grounds off the Durban coast, to various islands in the Indian Ocean, to Ceylon, and finally to success off the bleak south coast of Australia. This book records the experience of swimming in open water among hundreds of sharks at once, the beauties of strange seas and landscapes and the camaraderie, tension, humour and frustrations of people who live in close proximity and risk their lives day by day.

Sal Si Puedes

In the summer of 1968 Peter Matthiessen met Cesar Chavez for the first time. They were the same age: forty one. Matthiessen lived in New York City while Chavez lived in Sal Si Puedes, the San Jose barrio where his career as a union organizer took off. This book is Matthiessen’s panoramic yet finely detailed account of the three years he spent traveling and working with Chavez. In it, Matthiessen provides a candid look into the many sides of this enigmatic and charismatic leader who lived by the laws of nonviolence. More than thirty years later, Sal Si Puedes is less reportage than living history. A whole era comes alive in its pages: the Chicano, Black Power, and antiwar movements; the browning of the labor movement; Chavez’s series of hunger strikes; the nationwide boycott of California grapes. When Chavez died in 1993, thousands gathered at his funeral. It was a clear sign of how beloved he was, how important his life had been. A new postscript by the author brings the reader up to date as to the events that have unfolded since the writing of Sal Si Puedes. Ilan Stavans’s insightful foreword considers the significance of Chavez’s legacy for our time. As well as serving as an indispensable guide to the 1960s, this book rejuvenates the extraordinary vitality of Chavez’s life and spirit, giving his message a renewed and much needed urgency.

The Tree Where Man Was Born

This volume gives an illustrated account of Peter Matthiessen’s travels in East Africa from the Sudan, through Uganda and Kenya to Tanzania. He describes the wildlife and the game reserves of the Serengeti, Maasai Mara and the Ngorongoro Crater, and the archaeological sites at Olduvai Gorge and Laetoli in the Rift Valley. During these travels he meets Iain and Oria Douglas Hamilton, George Adamson and George Schaller, who all dedicated their lives to studying and protecting animals. The photographs by Eliot Porter show details of human and natural history, the daily lives of wild herdmen and stone age aborigines, and a records of the animals and landscapes of East Africa. Peter Matthiessen is the author of ‘At Play in the Fields of the Lord’, ‘Blue Meridian’, ‘Far Tortuga’, ‘The Snow Leopard’, ‘Killing Mister Watson’, ‘African Silences’ and ‘In the Spirit of Crazy Horse’.

The Wind Birds

In this nature writing classic, the National Book Award winning author of such works as Killing Mister Watson, Far Tortuga, The Snow Leopard, and At Play in Fields of the Lord captures the essence of the world’s most fascinating group of birds, conveying the biological and behavioral intricacies of shorebirds without dulling their romance and wonder.

The Snow Leopard

An unforgettable spiritual journey through the Himalayas now celebrating its thirtieth anniversaryIN 1973, Peter Matthiessen and field biologist George Schaller traveled high into the remote mountains of Nepal to study the Himalayan blue sheep and possibly glimpse the rare and beautiful snow leopard. Matthiessen, a student of Z en Buddhism, was also on a spiritual quest to find the Lama of Shey at the ancient shrine on Crystal Mountain. As the climb proceeds, Matthiessen charts his inner path as well as his outer one, with a deepening Buddhist understanding of reality, suffering, impermanence, and beauty.

Sand Rivers

In late 1979, the writer and naturalist Peter Matthiessen and the wildlife photographer Hugo van Lawick joined a safari into the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, one of the largest yet least known strongholds of wild animals left on earth. Sand Rivers is their beautiful account of a remarkable trip into this quintessential East African wilderness.

In the Spirit of Crazy Horse

A look at the events surrounding the incarceration of native American activist Leonard Peltier elucidates the traditional Indian concept of the sacred inviolability of the earth and presents new evidence supporting Peltier’s claims of innocence, arguing for a new trial.

Indian Country

An exploration of the encroachment of whites on the sacred grounds of the native Americans discusses such tribes as the Miccosukee, Hopi, Cherokee, Mohawk, Urok, Karuk, Lakota, Chumsah, Paiute, Shoshone, Ute, and Navajo. NYT.

Men’s Lives

An eloquent portrayal of a disappearing way of life of the Long Island fishermen whose voices humorous, bitter and bewildered are as clear as the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.

Nine-Headed Dragon River

In August 1968, naturalist explorer Peter Matthiessen returned from Africa to his home in Sagaponack, Long Island, to find three Zen masters in his driveway guests of his wife, a new student of Zen. Thirteen years later, Matthiessen was ordained a Buddhist monk. Written in the same format as his best selling The Snow Leopard, Nine Headed Dragon River reveals Matthiessen’s most daring adventure of all: the quest for his spiritual roots.

African Silences

African Silences is a powerful and sobering account of the cataclysmic depredation of the African landscape and its wildlife. In this critically acclaimed work Peter Matthiessen explores new terrain on a continent he has written about in two previous books, A Tree Where Man Was Born nominated for the National Book Award and Sand Rivers. Through his eyes we see elephants, white rhinos, gorillas, and other endangered creatures of the wild. We share the drama of the journeys themselves, including a hazardous crossing of the continent in a light plane. And along the way, we learn of the human lives oppressed by bankrupt political regimes and economies, and threatened by the slow ecological catastrophe to which they have only begun to awaken. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Baikal

The 1990 journey of Matthiessen, Paul Winter and a group of Russian environmentalists who traveled around Siberia’s Lake Baikal, the world’s oldest and deepest lake, containing one fifth of the planet’s fresh water, is chronicled in diary form. Norton’s 50 color photos enhance the text. A portion of the royalties go to Baikal Watch. Map.

East of Lo Monthang

In its heyday 1400 1600, the kingdom of Lo dominated the Kali Gandaki River trade between India and Tibet. By the 18th century, Lo had lost control over this trade and had been incorporated into the modern Kingdom of Nepal. Isolated deep in the Himalayas, Lo’s hereditary Rajas retained most of their feudal powers and the area remained closed to the outside world until 1991. In the spring of 1992, author Peter Matthiessen and photographer Tom Laird travelled deep in the secret valley of Sao Kohla, tucked high in the northernmost reaches of the Himalayas. They were the first Westerners to venture there in 30 years. From the central city of Lo Monthang, known as ‘Mustang’, Matthiessen and Laird, with an entourage of attendants and horseme*n, began an expedition across arid plateaux and through narrow river chasms to reach precariously perched monasteries. They camped among nomad herdsmen who spent nights guarding their goats from predatory snow leopards. This book reveals an unknown land where peaks five miles high cast their shadows over the deepest canyon in the world and where mountain nomads spend their lives herding their flocks across desolate slopes and through desert valleys.

Tigers in the Snow

No more than a few thousand tigers now survive in pockets of Asia, a continent they once roamed far and wide. The largest of them, the Siberian tiger, is today almost entirely confined to the little populated Russian Far East. Nearly extirpated before World War 11, Panthera tigris altaica made a comeback in subsequent decades. When poaching and habitat depredation following the implosion of the Soviet Union once again threatened extinction, a group of American wildlife biologists led by Maurice Hornocker joined with their Russian counterparts in founding the Siberian Tiger Project to study and protect this besieged race. Peter Matthiessen journeyed to the Russian Far Fast and other remaining tiger territory to witness for himself the species’ present condition and to understand its possible fates. Bringing to his subject his deep knowledge and the instinct for the natural world that have made classics of his previous books, he allows us to participate in the battle for the future of one of the earth’s most awesome creatures. Along the way, he tells the story of the species’ origin and evolution, evoking as well its crucial, often totemic role in the cultures and mythologies of the peoples who came in contact with it. He has made of the tiger’s dilemma not a manifesto but a drama underscoredby Hornocker’s stirring photographs that conveys powerfully what a loss to our collective imagination the disappearance of these great cats would be.

The Birds of Heaven

You don t have to be a craniac…
to appreciate this book…
All you really need is a passion for prose as good as it gets. Chicago Tribune

In legend, cranes often figure as harbingers of heaven and omens of longevity and good fortune. And in nature, they are an umbrella species whose well being assures that of the ecosystem at large. The Birds of Heaven chronicles Peter Matthiessen’s many journeys on five continents in search of the fifteen species of cranes. His telling captures the dilemmas of a planet in ecological crisis, and the deep loss to humankind if these beautiful and imposing creatures are allowed to disappear.
/Content /EditorialReview EditorialReview Source Amazon. com Review /Source Content Acclaimed writer Peter Matthiessen, a self professed ‘craniac,’ has been observing and studying all kinds of birds most of his life, but his pursuit of cranes is closer to a spiritual quest than a naturalist’s exercise. These majestic, mythic, and notoriously shy birds, capable of soaring at heights of 20,000 feet, are often fond of remote and rugged places, so just locating the birds can be difficult enough, determining an accurate number often impossible. Some locales, such as the breeding grounds on the Platte River in Nebraska, boast flocks half a million strong ‘by far the greatest crane assemblies on earth’; other areas support only a precious few. Matthiessen’s search for 15 different species of cranes has taken him to hidden corners of Siberia, China, Mongolia, Tibet, Sudan, and Australia where Atherton cranes were not even discovered until 1961. Despite his many years of adventure and wide travels, each crane sighting is still a thrill for him, and his curiosity and contagious enthusiasm bring the book alive. But The Birds of Heaven also serves as an ecological warning: ‘Perhaps more than any other living creatures, they evoke the retreating wilderness, the vanishing horizons of clean water, earth, and air upon which their species and ours, too, though we learn it very late must ultimately depend for survival.’ Shawn Carkonen

End of the Earth

Now in a paperback edition, America’s greatest literary naturalist takes readers on the ultimate wildlife safari: a true back of beyond voyage to the world’s most unforgiving land, the islands off Antarctica’s northern ice shelf, and to that second most remote place on earth, South Georgia Island, ‘the last outpost in a great emptiness of ocean.’ Matthiessen has once again lit upon a subject profoundly fitted to his creative genius. He is simply the ultimate lyricist of loss, a writer brilliantly attentive to the way vanishings are braided into even the most exquisite moments of our lives. He agonizes over what is passing away, but does so in a manner that increases our appreciation of what remains. In ‘End of the Earth,’ Matthiessen joins the crew of the Akademik a 384 foot research vessel bound for wild and storied South Georgia Island and Antarctica. Along the way we are treated to a patented Matthiessen brew: lyricism and emotion applied to the sharp eyed evaluations of a seasoned naturalist. Brilliant and instructive observations of the creatures inhabiting this far flung region are sprinkled with eloquent disquisition on the history of the region Shackleton, Captain Cook,

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