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.” 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 Matthie