Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and CIA agent. A cofounder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was the only writer to have won the National Book Award in both fiction and nonfiction. He was also a prominent environmental activist. Matthiessens nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse . His fiction was adapted for film the early story Travelin Man was made into The Young One by Luis Buuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord into the 1991 film of the same name.

Matthiessen was born in New York City to Erard A. and Elizabeth Matthiessen. Erard, an architect, joined the Navy during World War II and helped design gunnery training devices. Later, he gave up architecture to become a spokesman and fundraiser for the Audubon Society and the Nature Conservancy. The welltodo family lived in both New York City and Connecticut where, along with his brother, Matthiessen developed a love of animals that influenced his future work as a wildlife writer and naturalist. He attended St. Bernards School, the Hotchkiss School, and after briefly serving in the U.S. Navy Yale University , spent his junior year at the Sorbonne. At Yale, he majored in English, published short stories , and studied zoology. Marrying and resolving to undertake a writers career, he soon moved back to Paris, where he associated with other expatriate American writers such as William Styron, James Baldwin and Irwin Shaw. There, in 1953, he became one of the founders, along with Harold

Source: Wikipedia