True Nature

One of Library Journal’s Most Anticipated Fall Books
One of the Washington Post’s Anticipated Fall Books
One of Garden & Gun’s Fall Reading List
One of Alta Journal’s Most Anticipated Autumn Book Releases

“If a cat has 9 lives, Matthiessen seemed to have 29. . . . Lance Richardson . . . tracks his elusive prey along every uneven path with heroic thoroughness. . . . A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative.” —Pico Iyer, Air Mail​

“Matthiessen’s many masks are on display in True Nature, a deeply researched and artfully executed biography. . . . Mr. Richardon’s explication of [his subject’s] sui generis novels is astute and highly welcome. . . . Readers will leave True Nature with an enriched appreciation for Matthiessen.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“Beautifully written, insightful, and engaging, True Nature is a tour de force depiction of a charismatic, restless, self-absorbed, immensely talented literary lion.” —Glenn C. Altschuler, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

“Elegant and rigorous. . . . Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. . . . Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson.” —John Kaag, The Atlantic

“A magnificent literary biography, painstakingly researched, intricately organized, and beautifully written, fully worthy of its sensitive, restless, and driven subject. . . . It should be of interest to anyone drawn to the search for our true nature and the deepest truths of the human heart.” —David Guy, Tricycle

“True Nature is enthralling, expertly told, and based on extraordinary research.” —Michael O’Donnell, American Scholar

“Top-notch: sensitive, probing, admiring but never fawning, and exhaustively researched.” — Jonathan Miles, Garden & Gun

“Richardson’s fine-toothed research establishes Peter’s importance as a writer and a singular inhabitant of his time. That is the strength of a great biography—which True Nature is, illuminating Peter as an interpreter and translator of all things human as well as a defender of the natural world and everything in it.” —Terry McDonell, Alta

“I loved Lance Richardson’s True Nature, perhaps all the more because I was getting to know both Matthiessen and his writing from this terrifically absorbing chronicle. . . . A biographer aims both to attract new readers and to satisfy hardcore fans, a near-impossible feat that Richardson deftly achieves.” —Megan Marshall, Lit Hub

“Richardson is an accomplished storyteller. . . . True Nature is beautifully written, generous, but also uncompromising, and Richardson handles the complexities with insight and grace. One of the pleasures . . . is that [this] is also a book about the craft of writing [and] the solitary writer’s search for le mot juste.” —Scott Chaskey, The East Hampton Star

“This is a brilliant biography, bristling with ground-clearing primary-source research, filled with every findable fact about this writer, and, in an added twist as rare as it’s welcome, written with serious narrative flair.” —Steve Donoghue, Open Letters Review

“Impressive . . . A rigorous and balanced account of this restless soul. . . . Richardson shows how Matthiessen’s devotion to writing never wavered. In the process, he reveals the many sides (to quote Matthiessen’s own editor) of ‘an immensely complicated, neurotic, charming, iron-willed, uncertain, demanding author.’” —Guy Stagg, The Spectator
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“Capacious . . . Richardson’s carefully cross-hatched study of his subject depicts him in the wild, in all habitats and seasons. . . . A very considerable American life.” —Stephen Smith, Financial Times

“A comprehensive, compelling life of a man of many parts.” —Kirkus Reviews

“The first biography of the writer, and an engaging one at that . . . grounded in remarkably candid interviews with Matthiessen’s family members and lovers.” —Maggie Doherty, The New Yorker

“Richardson writes movingly of the melding of ecology and divinity in Matthiessen’s literary work, and of his years of activism. The result is a touching, unsparing, and fully rendered portrait of a complex figure of 20th-century literature.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“True Nature is a magnificent achievement: an immense work of scholarship, synthesis and empathy, written throughout with verve and lucidity, which illuminates one of the most fascinating writerly lives of the past century.” —Robert Macfarlane, bestselling author of Underland and Is a River Alive?

“Naturalist, novelist, Yeti-hunter, CIA agent—Peter Matthiessen led an exceptional life, and Lance Richardson does a wonderful job capturing it in all its complexity. True Nature is generous and sensitive, but at the same time clear-eyed about its outsized subject.” —Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction

“A riveting account of the tumultuous, untamed, yet determinedly focused life of Peter Matthiessen, a writer of planetary greatness. A superb nature writer, an uncompromising social and environmental activist, a devotee of Zen’s endless path toward transformation, and by all accounts a failure as a proper family man, Matthiessen has been gifted with an excellent biographer in Lance Richardson, whose True Nature approaches this life with a Zen-like quality of calm, gratitude, and expansiveness all its own.” —Joy Williams, winner of the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction

“True Nature is a stunning, formidable achievement by a brilliant biographer. Lance Richardson takes his readers on a wild ride with Peter Matthiessen—portraying the man in all his maddening complexities. And what a journey: founding The Paris Review, working undercover for the CIA, Zen master, chasing the snow leopard in the Himalayas. This intimate and gracefully written biography is absolutely enthralling.” —Kai Bird, Pulitzer Prize-winning co-author of American Prometheus

“Lance Richardson brilliantly captures Peter Matthiessen’s ‘pathological restlessness’ in this taut, propulsive, and riveting tale of a legendary life. We are with Matthiessen as he co-founds The Paris Review in postwar Europe, joins and leaves the CIA, explores the Amazon, treks through the Himalayas, and becomes a Zen master—all while writing the books that would help launch the environmental movement. Drawing on Matthiessen’s private papers and hundreds of interviews, Richardson creates an extraordinary portrait of an elusive writer who sought to protect the world’s last wild places. There is adventure, beauty, compassion, and deep insight on nearly every page. Compellingly crafted, doggedly researched, and elegantly written, True Nature is a true masterpiece of literary biography.” —Heather Clark, author of New York Times Top Ten Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath

“Brooding, sexy, troubled Peter Matthiessen, one of America’s last great WASP renegades, has had the immense posthumous luck of finding an ideal biographer in Lance Richardson, who patiently and artfully dissects a difficult life and a body of work that evades easy description. Matthiessen emerges from this book as an unexpected radical, an underappreciated Modernist, and a pioneering environmentalist. I can’t imagine that a fairer, better researched, more elegant biography will come out this year.” —Benjamin Moser, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag

“Comprehensive, deeply researched and lucidly written, this is the definitive biography of a complicated, fascinating and sometimes exasperating man.” —Adam Sisman, author of John le Carre: The Biography

“Peter Matthiessen was a restless seeker after the secrets of the universe—in nature, in psychedelic drugs, in Zen. And he kept many secrets of his own—Paris Review colleagues didn’t know he worked for the CIA; wives didn’t know how many lovers he had. Haunted by privilege, he seemed most comfortable where he least fit in, exhilarated by friction and difficulty, often created by his own Melvillean appetites. In his writing, he could make contradictions cohere and even bend reality to his tenacious gift. Lance Richardson, likewise, shapes the story of this wounded, angry, charismatic man into an irresistible portrait, alive with twentieth-century counterculture ideals that burned with hope and then burned out. Some of Matthiessen’s books read like an elegy to the planet, and this biography reads like an elegy to the last of the cool WASP men. It’s quite a story.” —Katherine Bucknell, author of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

“A nuanced account of the brilliant, driven, complicated man who gave us The Snow Leopard. Peter Matthiessen was always seeking something bigger, something more profound. And this wonderful biography echoes that ambition and questing spirit. Perceptive and consistently readable.” —Cal Flyn, international bestselling author of Islands of Abandonment