"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