Lance Richardson — 'True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen'

The first biography of Peter Matthiessen, the novelist, naturalist, and Zen roshi, whose trailblazing work championed Native American rights and helped usher in the modern environmental movement

Third Place Books welcomes biographer and author Lance Richardson for a conversation about his groundbreaking biography of Peter Matthiessen, True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen.

This event is co-sponsored by the North Cascades Institute, a nonprofit conservation organization working to inspire environmental stewardship through transformative learning experiences in nature. Learn more at ncascades.org.

Lance Richard's presentation is free and open to the public. For important updates, RSVP is highly recommended in advance. This event will include a public signing and time for audience Q&A. Sustain our author series by purchasing a copy of the featured book!

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About True Nature. . .

“A fair-minded, grippingly paced, and tremendously readable narrative.” —Pico Iyer, Air Mail

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. While 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 as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, 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, inspired by his travels, were unclassifiable meditations about Caymanian turtle hunters and frontier outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his nonfiction became legendary: nature books like Wildlife in America—“key parts of the canon of emergent environmental writing,” says Bill McKibben—as well as advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, and Native American land claims.

Underlying all Matthiessen’s disparate pursuits was the same existential search—to find a cure for “deep restlessness.” This search was most profoundly articulated in The Snow Leopard, his famous account of a 250-mile wildlife survey across the Himalayas. In True Nature, Lance Richardson reconstructs the full scope of a spiritual quest that ultimately led Matthiessen, even as he inflicted great pain on his family, to the highest ranks of Zen. Drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, 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.”

Lance Richardon'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 a year-long residency at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, at the New York Public Library. He teaches in the MFA in Writing program at Bennington College, Vermont.

About Third Place Books

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events.