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Peter Matthiessen

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Peter Matthiessen

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American novelist (1927–2014)

OverviewAI-generated

Peter Matthiessen was born on 22 May 1927 in New York City and died on 5 April 2014 in Sagaponack of leukemia. He worked as a novelist, writer, screenwriter and historian, and was educated at Yale University and Hotchkiss School. Matthiessen was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and received the John Burroughs Medal, the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Book Award. He was also nominated for the Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and his archives are held at the Harry Ransom Center. Open Library credits him with 115 works, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.

Synthesized by Vinony from 31 facts across 5 sources: Wikidata, Open Library, Crossref, TMDb, Vinony collections. Generated from structured data (not the Wikipedia text) and checked against those facts — may still contain errors.

Person · Open Library

Born
May 22, 1927
Died
April 5, 2014
Works
115

Top works

  • At play in the fields of the Lord
  • In the spirit of Crazy Horse
  • Hráči na vinici Páně
  • Tijgers in de sneeuw
  • De sneeuwluipaard

via Open Library + Wikidata

Film & TV

Acting

Known for

  • On Meditation — Self2016
  • Knight of Cups — Christopher2015
  • Doc — Himself2008
  • Warrior: The Life of Leonard Peltier — Self - Author, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse"1991

via TMDB

Music · MusicBrainz

Type
Person

via MusicBrainz · CC0

Listeners · Last.fm

Listeners
40
Total plays
177

<a href="https://www.last.fm/music/Peter+Matthiessen">Read more on Last.fm</a>

via Last.fm · Peter Matthiessen

Quotes

  • There’s a creation, a creating force. But whatever it is is in everything we see. It’s in that log, in that stone. It’s just the power. And I’ve had many experiences with it. Certain circumstances bring it out, which all the mystics know. That is part of our Zen training too. It’s called an "opening." … For a second, you see what the world is. It is a whole other way of seeing, which is horrible, terrifying, and extraordinary and a great blessing to have.
  • Amazingly, we take for granted that instinct for survival, fear of death, must separate us from the happiness of pure and uninterpreted experience, in which body, mind, and nature are the same. And this debasement of our vision, the retreat from wonder, the backing away like lobsters into safe crannies, the desperate instinct that our life passes unlived, is reflected in proliferation without joy, corrosive money rot, the gross befouling of the earth and air and water from which we came.
  • Every moment of life is to be lived calmly, mindfully, as if it were the last, to insure that the most is made of the precious human state — the only one in which enlightenment is possible. And only the enlightened can recall their former lives; for the rest of us, the memories of past existences are but glints of light, twinges of longing, passing shadows, disturbingly familiar, that are gone before they can be grasped, like the passage of that silver bird on Dhaulagiri.
  • In another life — this isn’t what I know, but how I feel — these mountains were my home; there is a rising of forgotten knowledge, like a spring from hidden aquifers under the earth. To glimpse one’s own true nature is a kind of homegoing, to a place East of the Sun, West of the Moon — the homegoing that needs no home, like that waterfall on the upper Suli Gad that turns to mist before touching the earth and rises once again into the sky.
  • I am a writer. A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places. I have written more books of nonfiction because my fiction is an exploratory process — not laborious, merely long and slow and getting slower.

via Wikiquote · CC BY-SA

Key facts

Born
( 1927-05-22 ) May 22, 1927, New York City, U.S.
Died
April 5, 2014 (2014-04-05) (aged 86), Sagaponack, New York , U.S.
Occupation
Writer
Language
English
Education
Yale University ( BA )
Period
1950–2014
Genre
Nature writing travel writing history novels
Notable works
The Snow Leopard Shadow Country
Notable awards
Heinz Award for Arts and Humanities (2000) National Book Award for Fiction (2008)
Spouse
Patsy Southgate ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1950 ; divorced</span>"}]]}'>div. 1956 ) ​ Deborah Love ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1963 ; died 1972 ) ​ Maria Eckhart, ​ ​ ( married</span>"}]]}'>m. 1980 ) ​

via Wikipedia infobox

Wikidata facts

Instance of
human
Given name
Peter
Gender
male
Citizenship
United States
Place of birth
New York City
Place of death
Sagaponack
Occupation
historian
Languages spoken
English language
Image
Peter Matthiessen photograph.jpg
Show 11 more facts
date of death
2014-04-05
Commons category
Peter Matthiessen
date of birth
1927-05-22
cause of death
leukemia
manner of death
natural causes
name in kana
ピーター・マシーセン
name in native language
Peter Matthiessen
described by source
The Paris Review
personal library at
Harry Ransom Center
Sources (15)

via Wikidata · CC0

~12 min read

Encyclopedic overview

Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 – April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer, zen teacher, and onetime CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he is the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both nonfiction (The Snow Leopard, 1979, category Contemporary Thought) and fiction (Shadow Country, 2008). He was also a prominent environmental activist.

Matthiessen's 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.

Excerpted from Wikipedia’s “Peter Matthiessen” article, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.

Gallery (2)