American · b. 1927
National Book Award (twice)
American novelist, naturalist, and explorer, twice winner of the National Book Award, celebrated for The Snow Leopard and his Watson Trilogy.
Peter Matthiessen was one of the most distinguished American writers of the twentieth century, a figure who combined extraordinary literary gifts with a life of genuine adventure and spiritual seeking. A co-founder of the Paris Review in 1953, he later revealed that his time in Paris had also served as cover for CIA activity — a revelation that added another layer of complexity to an already remarkable biography.
The Snow Leopard, published in 1978, is widely considered his masterpiece. It chronicles a two-month journey into the Himalayas of Nepal with zoologist George Schaller to study the Himalayan blue sheep and, if fortune allowed, catch a glimpse of the elusive snow leopard. Woven throughout the naturalist narrative is a profound meditation on Zen Buddhism, grief, and the nature of presence. The book won the National Book Award and has endured as a classic of both travel writing and spiritual literature.
Matthiessen was also a celebrated novelist. His Watson Trilogy — Killing Mister Watson, Lost Man’s River, and Bone by Bone, later condensed into Shadow Country, which won a second National Book Award — is an ambitious fictionalized account of the life and legend of sugar cane planter E. J. Watson in the Florida Everglades. A committed environmentalist and Zen Buddhist priest, Matthiessen brought moral seriousness and lyrical precision to everything he wrote until his death in 2014.
Long before The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen had established himself as one of the foremost nature writers and explorers of his time, traveling to some of the planet’s most remote and endangered regions to document wildlife, landscapes, and cultures on the verge of disappearance. His early book Wildlife in America (1959) was a pioneering survey of species driven to extinction or the brink of it, an influential early work of environmental consciousness. He journeyed to the Amazon, to New Guinea, to the Arctic, and across Africa, producing books that combined rigorous natural observation with a profound sense of the fragility of the living world. The Tree Where Man Was Born rendered East Africa with extraordinary attentiveness, while Far Tortuga, an experimental novel about Caribbean turtle fishermen, demonstrated his willingness to push literary form in pursuit of a truer evocation of place and labour. Throughout, his writing reflects a deep ecological ethic and an elegiac awareness that he was often recording worlds in the process of being lost. Matthiessen wrote as a witness, bringing scientific precision and a poet’s eye to the wild places he believed were vanishing, and his body of nature writing remains among the most distinguished in the American tradition.
The Snow Leopard endures as Matthiessen’s masterpiece because it fuses two journeys into a single seamless narrative: an outward trek across the punishing terrain of the Nepalese Himalayas, and an inward pilgrimage of grief and spiritual searching. He undertook the expedition not long after the death of his wife from cancer, and the book becomes a meditation on loss, impermanence, and the discipline of presence drawn from his deepening practice of Zen Buddhism. The elusive snow leopard, rarely glimpsed and never quite seen by Matthiessen on the journey, functions as a perfect emblem of the spiritual goal that recedes the more deliberately it is pursued — a lesson in acceptance, in letting go of the grasping mind. The book interweaves vivid descriptions of mountain landscapes, Tibetan Buddhist culture, and the rigours of high-altitude travel with passages of genuine philosophical and emotional depth. Its honesty about doubt, longing, and the difficulty of the contemplative path keeps it from sentimentality, and its lyrical precision has made it a touchstone of both travel literature and spiritual writing. Few books so fully unite the physical and the metaphysical, and its enduring popularity confirms its status as a modern classic.
Matthiessen’s life was as remarkable as his work, marked by contradictions and reinventions that lend his biography unusual richness. A co-founder of The Paris Review, he later disclosed that the magazine had partly served as cover for his work with the CIA in his youth, an admission that complicated his standing as a writer of conscience. He evolved into a fierce environmental and social activist, and his nonfiction book In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, defending a Native American activist, embroiled him in years of libel litigation that tested his commitment to telling difficult truths. He became an ordained Zen priest, and Buddhist practice came to suffuse his sensibility and his prose. Uniquely among American writers, he won the National Book Award in both nonfiction and, decades later, fiction, a testament to the breadth of his mastery. His final novel appeared shortly before his death in 2014, the work of a man who never stopped writing or seeking. Matthiessen leaves behind a legacy as one of the most versatile and morally serious figures in American letters — explorer, naturalist, novelist, activist, and spiritual seeker — whose finest books continue to be read for their beauty, depth, and unflinching engagement with the natural world and the human heart.
The essential starting point is The Snow Leopard, his masterpiece and most beloved book, which fuses Himalayan adventure, natural history, and a profound meditation on grief and Zen Buddhism into a single luminous narrative; it is the work that best captures his unique blend of physical and spiritual seeking. Readers drawn to his nature writing should explore The Tree Where Man Was Born, his richly observed evocation of East Africa, or his pioneering early survey Wildlife in America. Those interested in his fiction should turn to Shadow Country, the condensed and definitive version of his Watson Trilogy set in the Florida Everglades, which won him a second National Book Award and represents the summit of his novelistic achievement; the experimental Far Tortuga offers another, stranger pleasure. His activist work is best represented by In the Spirit of Crazy Horse. Given the breadth of his output across nature writing, travel, fiction, and spiritual reflection, The Snow Leopard remains the ideal introduction, the book in which all his gifts converge most completely.
by Peter Matthiessen
Peter Matthiessen and zoologist George Schaller trek 250 miles into the Himalayas to study the bharal (Himalayan blue sheep) and their predator, the nearly mythical snow leopard — a physical journey that becomes a meditation on grief, Zen Buddhism, and the nature of consciousness.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)guide
Where to start with Peter Matthiessen — how to approach The Snow Leopard, his National Book Award-winning account of a Himalayan journey that becomes a sustained inquiry into grief, presence, and Zen practice. A complete reading guide.
list
Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard combines a Himalayan trek with Buddhist philosophy and a meditation on grief. These books share its depth: journeys into extreme landscapes that become inquiries into perception, loss, and what it means to be fully present.
Disclosure: Amazon links on this page are affiliate links. If you purchase through them we earn a small commission at no extra cost to you.