Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) was a successful novelist and environmental writer who was also at various points a Zen priest, CIA spy and commercial fisherman – and yet he remains somewhat obscure. Now Lance Richardson has written a biography, though less to blow the dust off his subject than to satisfy his own curiosity. In books like The Snow Leopard (1978), which won a National Book Award in the USA, Matthiessen described nature with Linnaean precision while posing metaphysical questions with an attractive simplicity. How, Richardson wondered, did Matthiessen develop the ‘voracious open-mindedness’ that enabled him to contemplate both the natural and supernatural realms without seeking to reconcile them? This narrow question bloomed into a 700-page life that is even-handed, perceptive, smoothly narrated and exhaustively researched. 

Matthiessen was born into New York wealth. His father was a society architect whose parents were cousins dynastically allied; one side founded a bank, the other set up what became the American Sugar Refining Company. George Plimpton, with whom Matthiessen later started the Paris Review, was a neighbour (on Fifth Avenue) and classmate (at prep school). 

The young Matthiessen sought relief from school and family in nature. He watched birds and collected snakes, some poisonous, charging friends to watch them gobble mice. Love of animals led him to Kipling, whose work inspired a ‘yearning for wild places and wild experience’. Another touchstone was The Wind in