Peter Matthiessen

A roving author and naturalist whose impassioned nonfiction explored the remote endangered wilds of the world and whose prizewinning fiction often placed his mysterious protagonists in the heart of them. Mr. Matthiessen was one of the last survivors of a generation of American writers who came of age after World War II and who all seemed to know one another. In the early 1950s, he shared a sojourn in Paris with fellow literary expatriates and helped found The Paris Review, a magazine devoted largely to new fiction and poetry. His childhood friend George Plimpton became its editor. Only years later did Mr. Plimpton discover, to his anger and dismay, that Mr. Matthiessen had helped found The Review as a cover for his spying on Americans in France for the CIA. Peter Matthiessen was born on May 22, 1927, in Manhattan, a descendant of Scandinavian whale hunters and the second of three children of Erard A. Matthiessen, an architect and conservationist, and the former Elizabeth Carey. He grew up with his brother and sister on Fifth Avenue, overlooking Central Park (in the same building as Mr. Plimpton), and in country homes on Fishers Island, N.Y., and in Connecticut. He attended St. Bernard’s School in Manhattan (with Mr. Plimpton) and, in Connecticut, Greenwich Country Day School and Hotchkiss, where he graduated in 1945. He served in the Navy at Pearl Harbor and afterward attended Yale, where he majored in English but also studied biology, ornithology and zoology. He spent his junior year in Paris at the Sorbonne. He graduated from Yale in 1950 and stayed on for another term to teach creative writing. he was recruited by the C.I.A. and traveled to Paris, where he crossed paths with young expatriate American writers like Styron, Jones, James Baldwin and Irwin Shaw. In the postwar years the agency covertly financed magazines and cultural programs to counter the spread of Communism. In interviews years later, Mr. Matthiessen said that in those days working for the C.I.A. was seen by many of his peers as honorable government service and that it had offered him “a free trip to Paris to write my novel.” After his divorce, in 1958, that Mr. Matthiessen bought his oceanfront house, on six acres, in Sagaponack. In 1963, he married Deborah Love, a writer and poet, and the Sagaponack house became one of many gathering spots for his literary circle. His spiritual hunger and the death of his wife from cancer in 1972 lay behind his decision to travel to Nepal in 1973. Ostensibly he went there to record a field trip with the biologist George Schaller. But the book it inspired, “The Snow Leopard,” also chronicled a spiritual journey and a pilgrimage of mourning shadowed by that rare animal, whose presence Mr. Matthiessen finally sensed even if he never actually caught sight of one. The book won the 1979 National Book Award for nonfiction. In 1980 Mr. Matthiessen married Maria Eckhart, a former media buyer for an advertising firm in London who was born in Tanzania. Besides his son Alex and daughter Rue from his marriage to Deborah Love, Mr. Matthiessen is also survived by his son Luke and a daughter, Sara Carey, from his first marriage to Patsy Southgate; two stepdaughters, Antonia and Sarah Koenig; and six grandchildren.