Peter Matthiessen

Set in the South American jungle, this thriller follows the clash between two misplaced gringos--one who has come to convert the Indians to Christianity, and one who has been hired to kill them. Now the basis for a major motion picture.

A timeless and majestic portrait of Africa by renowned writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), author of the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard and the new novel In Paradise
A finalist for the National Book Award when it was released in 1972, this vivid portrait of East Africa remains as fresh and revelatory now as on the day it was first published. Peter Matthiessen exquisitely combines nature and travel writing to...

"From the two-time National Book Award winning author of The Snow Leopard and Shadow Country, a short, powerful novel about an American professor of Holocaust Studies who, over the course of a weeklong spiritual retreat at Auschwitz, is forced to grapple with his own past and a family secret: the Jewish mother abandoned to her doom by his Gentile father"--

One of a very few National Book Award honorees to be nominated for fiction and nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen creates a curious blend of both in this tragic prequel to Killing Mister Watson and Lost Man's River. An amazing novel in its own right, Bone by Bone caps the trilogy featuring the enigmatic E.J. Watson. During the Reconstruction Era, Edgar Watson grew up in the South at the mercy of a brutal alcoholic father and a vindictive mother. Witnessing...

An eloquent portrayal of a disappearing way of life of the Long Island fishermen whose voices—humorous, bitter and bewildered—are as clear as the threatened beauty of their once quiet shore.

Since the 1950s Peter Matthiessen has written fiction and nonfiction of elemental power and moral vision, including the acclaimed novels At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga and works of naturalism and exploration like the National Book Award-winning The Snow Leopard.
This stunning collection of short stories, available for the first time in paperback, spans more than three decades of writing by one of the most...

Shadow Country is Peter Matthiessen's reimagining of the legend of E. J. Watson, the Everglades sugarcane planter and notorious outlaw of the wild Florida frontier. Vividly capturing the American hinterlands at the turn of the twentieth century, it traces the story of Watson through eyewitness perspectives as he drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him.

Shadow Country traverses

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When Peter Matthiessen was 17, he was told the story of Edgar J. Watson, a popular and successful planter who had been murdered by his neighbors in 1910. This novel is Matthiessen's attempt to piece together the life of a mysterious man who became a legend, and the dangerous legend that destroyed him. During the Reconstruction Era, Edgar Watson grew up in the South at the mercy of a brutal alcoholic father and a vindictive mother. Witnessing the horrors...