PETER MATTHIESSEN was born in New York City in 1927 and had sold his first short story by the time he graduated from Yale University in 1950. The following year, he was a founder of "The Paris Review." From 1953 to 1956, he worked as a commercial fisherman and as captain of a charter fishing boat out of Montauk, while he completed his second novel. With a lifelong passion for the wild, Matthiessen has explored endangered natural environments and human cultures threatened by encroaching technology, producing many published accounts of his travels, among them, "The Snow Leopard," which won the National Book Award. His most recent travels took him to Siberia, Korea, Australia, Bali, India, and South Africa.

Matthiessen's oeuvre also includes seven novels, a book of short stories and an account of a spiritual pilgrimage to Japan. Matthiessen has also written three books about Indian people: "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" (filmed in 1991--a stunning drama about the fate of a tribe of Amazonian Indians); "In The Spirit of Crazy Horse" (centering on Leonard Peltier, a prominent figure in the American Indian Movement in the 1970s) and "Indian Country." Other works of nonfiction include "The Cloud Forest" and "Under the Mountain Wall" (which together received an Award of Merit from the National Institute of Arts and Letters to which he was elected in 1974.

Matthiessen's most recent novel is "Lost Man's River," the second of a trilogy of novels about southwest Florida in the early part of this century, published by Random House in 1997.

More about Peter Matthiessen can be found at Eco Books web site.

• 1954: RACE ROCK (novel), Harper Bros.
  
• 1955: PARTISANS (novel), Viking Press
  
• 1959: WILDLIFE IN AMERICA, Viking
  
• 1961: THE CLOUD FOREST, Viking
  
• 1962: UNDER THE MOUNTAIN WALL, Viking
  
• 1965: AT PLAY IN THE FIELDS OF THE LORD (novel), Random House
  
• 1966: THE SHOREBIRDS OF NORTH AMERICA, Viking
  (Popular edition, THE WIND BIRDS, Viking, 1970)
  
• 1969: SAL SI PUEDES (Cesar Chavez...) , Random House
  
• 1971: BLUE MERIDIAN (Search for Great White Shark), Random House
  
• 1972: THE TREE WHERE MAN WAS BORN (African Journals), Dutton
  
• 1975: FAR TORTUGA (novel), Random House
  
• 1978 THE SNOW LEOPARD, Viking (Won National Book Award--1979)
  
• 1981: SAND RIVERS, Viking
  
• 1983: IN THE SPIRIT OF CRAZY HORSE, Viking
  
• 1984: INDIAN COUNTRY, Viking
  
• 1986: NINE-HEADED DRAGON RIVER, Zen Journals 1969-1982, Shambhala
  
• 1986: MEN'S LIVES, The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork, Random House
  
• 1989: ON THE RIVER STYX AND OTHER STORES, Random House
  
• 1990: KILLING MISTER WATSON (novel), Random House
  
• 1991: AFRICAN SILENCES, Random House
  
• 1992: SHADOWS OF AFRICA, with Mary Frank, Abrams
  
• 1992: BAIKAL, Sacred Sea of Siberia, Sierra Club Book
  
• 1995: East of LO MONTHANG in the Land of Mustang, Shambhala
  
• 1997: LOST MAN'S RIVER (novel), Random House

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