Writer-Environmentalist Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen's Works Include "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord"

a rich man's son who spurned a life of ease in favor of physical and spiritual challenges and produced such acclaimed works as "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," died Saturday. He was 86. His publisher Geoff Kloske of Riverhead Books said Mr. Matthiessen, who had been diagnosed with leukemia, was ill "for some months." He died at a hospital near his home on Long Island.

Mr. Matthiessen helped found The Paris Review, one of the most influential literary magazines, and won National Book Awards for "The Snow Leopard," his spiritual account of the Himalayas, and for "Shadow Country." His new novel, "In Paradise," is scheduled for publication Tuesday. 

A leading environmentalist and wilderness writer, he embraced the best and worst that nature could bring him, whether trekking across the Himalayas, parrying sharks in Australia or enduring a hurricane in Antarctica.

He was a longtime liberal who befriended Cesar Chavez and wrote a defense of Indian activist Leonard Peltier, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," that led to a highly publicized, and unsuccessful, lawsuit by an FBI agent who claimed Mr. Matthiessen had defamed him.

Mr. Matthiessen was born in New York in 1927, the son of Erard A. Matthiessen, a wealthy architect and conservationist. While at Yale, he wrote the short story "Sadie," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he soon acquired an agent. After graduation he moved to Paris and, along with fellow writer-adventurer George Plimpton, helped found The Paris Review. (Mr. Matthiessen would later acknowledge he was a CIA recruit at the time and used his work with the Review as a cover).


The magazine caught on, but Paris only reminded Mr. Matthiessen that he was an American writer. In the mid-1950s, he returned to the U.S., moved to Long Island's Sag Harbor (where he eventually lived on a six-acre estate), socialized with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other painters, operated a deep-sea fishing charter boat — and wrote.

In 1961, Mr. Matthiessen emerged as a major novelist with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," his tale of missionaries under siege from both natives and mercenaries in the jungles of Brazil. Its detailed account of a man's hallucinations brought him a letter of praise from LSD guru Timothy Leary. The book was later adapted into a film of the same name, starring John Lithgow and Daryl Hannah.

In the 1980s and '90s, Mr. Matthiessen published a trio of novels—"Killing Mr. Watson," ''Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone"—about a community in Florida's Everglades at the turn of the 20th century and a predatory planter. Unhappy, especially with "Lost Man's River," he spent years revising and condensing all three books into "Shadow Country," published in 2008 and a surprise National Book Award winner. Much of his fiction, from "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" to "Bone by Bone," bestowed a lion-like aura upon nature—grand when respected, dangerous when provoked, tragic when exploited.