Peter Matthiessen (Author)

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Peter Matthiessen (June 2008)

Peter Matthiessen (born May 22, 1927 in New York City , † April 5, 2014 in Sagaponack on Long Island , New York State) was an American author , environmentalist and conservationist .

Working life

Matthiessen came from the East Coast establishment. He graduated from Yale University in 1950 and lived in Paris in the early 1950s , where he founded the literary magazine The Paris Review with George Plimpton and others . He later admitted that he was working for the US secret service CIA at the time. In 1959 his first book Wildlife in America was published. in which he drew attention to the disappearance and the endangerment of flora and fauna by humans and was one of the first to point out climate change . His 1965 novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord , which was filmed by Héctor Babenco in 1991 , describes the encounter between a group of American missionaries and South American natives. In 1968 he was one of the signatories of the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest", with which the authors and editors pledged not to pay federal taxes until the end of the Vietnam War .

In 1971 Matthiessen documented with the photo book Blue Meridian: The Search for the Great White Shark together with the photographer Peter A. Lake the making of the film Blue Water, White Death by Peter Gimbel , a documentary film about the great white shark . At the end of 1973 he went to the Himalayas with the biologist George Schaller , whom he had already met during a stay in Tanzania . He recorded his experiences in 1978 in the book The Snow Leopard , which was awarded the National Book Award in 1979 and 1980 .

In his 1983 book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, Matthiessen dealt with the story and trial of the American Indian Movement activist Leonard Peltier , who was sentenced to life imprisonment twice and who is expected to remain in prison until 2040.

In order to be able to support his wife and family, Matthiessen wrote for magazines such as Holiday and Sports Illustrated and especially for The New Yorker published by William Shawn . There some of his books appeared in sequels. His novel Far Tortuga also emerged from a report for the New Yorker .

He was one of the most famous authors of the generation of World War II writers who were related; these included and still include William Styron , James Jones , Kurt Vonnegut and EL Doctorow .

Private

According to his father's family chronicle from 1811, Peter Matthiessen was a descendant of Matthias Petersen ("Happy Matthias", 1632–1706), a prominent whaling captain from the village of Oldsum on the North Frisian island of Föhr . Three of his great-grandchildren emigrated to the United States in the late 18th century. In the late 1980s, Matthiessen first visited the North Sea island in the footsteps of his ancestors and reported on it in an autobiographical essay (see list of works).

Since the late 1950s, Matthiessen lived in Sagaponack on the eastern end of Long Island in New York State . There he had a zendō built, a Buddhist prayer room, where he practiced Zen three times a week . He had learned Zen under Eido Roshi (1932–2018), Yasutani Roshi (1885–1973) and Soen Roshi (1907–1984). Soen Roshi became his main teacher. He also practiced with Maezumi Roshi (1931–1995) and Bernie Glassman (1939–2018), from whom he received the Dharma transmission in 1989 .

Matthiessens first marriage was divorced after a short time, his second wife, Deborah Love, also a follower of Zen Buddhism , died at the end of 1972 of cancer. He married his third wife, Maria, at a Zen ceremony on Long Island. He died of acute leukemia after more than a year of treatment.

Awards

Works

  • Partisans. 1955.
  • The Cloud Forest. A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness . 1961.
  • Raditzer . Viking Press, New York City, USA 1961.
  • Under the Mountain Wall: A Chronicle of Two Seasons in the Stone Age . Viking Press, New York City 1962.
    • German: The hidden valley . Droemer / Knaur, Munich 1964.
  • At Play in the Fields of the Lord . Random House, New York City 1965, ISBN 0-679-73741-3 .
  • Oomingnak: he Expedition to the Musk Ox Island in the Bering Sea. Hastings House, New York City 1967.
  • with Gardner D. Scout (Eds.) and Robert Verity Clem (Illustrator): The Shorebirds of North America. Viking Press, New York City 1967.
  • Sal si puedes: Cesar Chavez and the new American Revolution. 2nd Edition. Dell Publishing, New York City 1969.
  • Far Tortuga . 1975.
    • German: Far Tortuga . Novel. Translated by Joachim Kalka. Rotbuch Verlag, Berlin 2000, ISBN 3-434-53008-8 .
  • Tigers in the Snow. 1978.
    • German by Hans Joachim Maass: Tiger in the snow: A plea for the Siberian tiger . Frederking and Thaler, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-89405-428-X .
  • The Snow Leopard. 1978. (On the trail of the snow leopard).
  • Nine-Headed Dragon River. 1985.
    • English: At the river of the nine-headed dragon. Encounters and experiences on the path of Zen . Barth-Verlag, Munich 1987.
  • Sand Rivers. with the photographer Hugo van Lawick . Aurum Press, London 1981, ISBN 0-906053-22-6 .
  • On the River Styx and Other Stories . 1989.
  • The search for the happy Matthias - an American on the trail of his ancestors . Published in German in: Merian - Sylt • Amrum • Föhr. Edition May 1989, 42nd year, Volume 5, pp. 114-127. Hoffmann and Campe Verlag, Hamburg 1989
  • The Tree where Man Was Born. Penguin Books, New York City 1995, ISBN 0-14-023934-0 .
  • The Birds of Heaven: Travels with Cranes. Harvill, London 2001, ISBN 1-86046-947-7 .
    • English: The kings of the skies: traveling with cranes . Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 2010, ISBN 978-3-596-18195-7 .
  • Shadow Country. A New Rendering of the Watson Legend . Modern Library, 2008, ISBN 978-0-679-64019-6 .
  • In paradise. Riverhead, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-59463-317-1 .

Web links

Commons : Peter Matthiessen  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Peter Matthiessen Dies: Influential Writer And Environmentalist Dead At 86.
  2. ↑ Jeff Himmelman: Peter Matthiessen's Homegoing. nytimes.com, April 3, 2014, accessed April 6, 2014.
  3. ↑ a b Christopher Lehman-Haupt: Peter Matthiessen, Lyrical Writer and Naturalist, Is Dead at 86. (Obituary), nytimes.com, April 5, 2014, accessed April 6, 2014.
  4. ↑ The one who swam with the great white shark. Obituary. In: FAZ. April 6, 2014.
  5. ↑ Under the rolling sun . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung . July 22, 2000.
  6. ↑ Peter Matthiessen: The search for the happy Matthias - An American on the trail of his ancestors. In: Merian - Sylt • Amrum • Föhr. 1989.
  7. ↑ Members: Peter Matthiessen. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 13, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Matthiessen, Peter
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American author, environmentalist, and conservationist
DATE OF BIRTH May 22, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York
DATE OF DEATH 5th April 2014
Place of death Sagaponack (New York) , Long Island