In conversation with Philip Gourevitch, Lance Richardson discusses his new book True Nature, which depicts Peter Matthiessen’s life.
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. Though 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 while working undercover for the CIA. 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 were unclassifiable. Underlying all Matthiessen’s pursuits was the same existential search—to find a cure for “deep restlessness.” This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, Lance Richardson 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.”
Former Leon Levy Fellow Lance Richardson's first book, House of Nutter: The Rebel Tailor of Savile Row, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and named one of the notable titles of 2018 by The Sunday Times, The Mail on Sunday, Esquire, and the American Library Association. He has been awarded numerous fellowships, including the Hazel Rowley Literary Fellowship, and a year-long residency at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.
Philip Gourevitch is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker, the Glenn & Amanda Fuhrman Chair for the Study of Language and Literature at the Bard Prison Initiative, and formerly the editor of The Paris Review. He is the author of Standard Operating Procedure / The ballad of Abu Ghraib (2008), A Cold Case (2001), and We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: stories from Rwanda (1998), which won numerous honors, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, and recognition by The Guardian as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time. His new book, forthcoming from Farrar, Straus & Giroux, is You Hide That You Hate Me And I Hide That I Know.
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