Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City in 1927 and had already begun his writing career by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of The Paris Review. Besides At Play in the Fields of the Lord, which was nominated for the National Book Award, he published six other works of fiction, including Far Tortuga and Killing Mister Watson. Matthiessen's parallel career as a naturalist and explorer resulted in numerous widely acclaimed books of nonfiction, among them The Tree Where Man Was Born, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and The Snow Leopard, which won it. Matthiessen died in 2014.
Matthiessen, novelist and author of ac claimed nature works such as the Snow Leopard , was a commercial fisherman in the early 1950s on the South Fork of Long Island and has lived there since. As both knowledgeable insider and keen observer of a passing culture, he writes of the independent, tough, skilled members of a few large families who have fished those coastal waters for generations, but who no longer can make a living in the face of regulations, political restrictions, economic pres sures, and biased opposition from an gling groups. This is a somewhat melan choly portrait of frontier characters bowing to modernism, but it is also a masterful celebration of craft, of pride in one's work, of community, of endur ance. Finely written and highly recom mended for public and academic librar ies in the Northeast and for American studies collections everywhere. Photos not seen. Roland Person, Southern Il linois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
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