Featured New Authors
Featured Author: Peter Matthiessen
Featured Author: Peter Matthiessen
With News and Reviews From the Archives of The New York Times
In This Feature
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 Linda Girvin/ Random House |
| Peter Matthiessen |
(1954)
“That [Matthiessen] has a genuine talent for fiction seems to me proved by ‘Race Rock.’ That he has used it altogether wisely seems much more doubtful.”
(1955)
“[Matthiessen] . . . has a rare talent for persuading us to suspend our disbelief while his hero is being continually astonished by the obvious.”
(1959)
“‘Wildlife in America,’ by Peter Matthiessen, is a superb history of the other inhabitants with which we share this continent and the seas around it.”
(1961)
“Mr. Matthiessen has three indispensable qualities for an all-around writer: a sense of style, a sense of humor and an ungovernable curiosity . . . this is his best book, and it brings into play all his capacities.”
(1961)
“In ‘Raditzer’ Peter Matthiessen has written a short novel about one of the most astonishing scoundrels we have seen in a long time. He certainly seems dull at first sight. Yet he develops into a burning specimen
of rampant evil.”
(1962)
“This sensitively written book by Peter Matthiessen is an engrossing human document that sheds light on the story of man, stone-age or modern.”
(1965)
“In unfair jargon, the book is a near miss, and the more irritating for being so near.”
(1971)
“While the book is basically an advertisement . . . it is a very high-class advertisement, filled with strong descriptive writing, interesting lore about diving and undersea life, high-tension scenes involving the relationships
of the crew and the fluctuating fortunes of the adventure, and some of the most spectacular color photographs I have ever seen.”
(1972)
“The book is fascinating in its way for the splendor of Mr. Porter’s photographs and for Mr. Matthiessen’s prose, but the story we are awaiting, the feel of emergent Africa, is still as shrouded in mist as the
crests of its fabled mountains.”
(1975)
“Peter Matthiessen’s fifth novel, ‘Far Tortuga,’ is a singular experience, a series of moments captured whole and rendered with a clarity that quickens the blood.”
(1978)
“Peter Matthiessen has made another of his epic trips for us–epic in the sense that he writes about them so much better than anybody else who has been undertaking journeys such as his in recent years.”
(1981)
“‘Sand Rivers’ is a strange, bittersweet, autumnal book based on a safari into the Selous Game Reserve in southern Tanzania, one of the last great wildernesses left on earth. Once again we have a clear triumph
from Peter Matthiessen.”
(1983)
“As Mr. Matthiessen uncomfortably forces us to realize, we cannot simply feel a distant guilt about past massacres, land expropriations and cultural annihilations. We are part of the persisting assault on the dignity, property
and life of our original native population.”
(1984)
“An eloquent and painful look at the past and present situations in many Indian territories where social unrest and injustice have turned into open confrontation. But what makes this book most unusual and most valuable
is its effort to infuse the inevitable anger and sorrow with a sense of immediate urgency, with prophetic warnings.”
(1986)
“Smart old man plus gullible student equals two fools in the end. There are too many fools showing off throughout Mr. Matthiessen’s notes.”
(1986)
“In this magnificent and somber portrait of the fishing community of the South Fork of Long Island, Peter Matthiessen shows a stubbornly surviving culture being carelessly exterminated.”
(1989)
“This book of departures and ambiguous returns fascinatingly suggests some of the history of a splendid writer’s imagination.”
(1990)
“‘Killing Mister Watson” is Peter Matthiessen’s sixth and most impressive novel, a fiction in the tradition of Joseph Conrad, as fiercely incisive as the work of Sinclair Lewis, a virtuoso performance
that powerfully indicts the heedlessness and hidden criminality that are part and parcel of America’s devotion to the pursuit of wealth, to its cult of financial success.”
(1991)
“Much of the reportage is stunningly sad, detailing the decimation of elephants and other wildlife in large sections of Africa in recent decades and before. But Mr. Matthiessen, the American writer, traveler and naturalist,
also has some good news to tell about steps that have been taken to protect wildlife.”
(1997)
“This is a project of enormous ambition, laying out the interconnected lives of at least two dozen families whose fortunes and misfortunes betoken the history of the entire state . . .”
(1999)
“Powerful and laconically lyrical prose . . . A work of genuine dignity. Matthiessen has worked with an artisan’s patient strokes to accomplish the hard thing.”
(May 28, 1983)
Gov. William Janklow of South Dakota filed a $24 million lawsuit against Viking, the author Peter Matthiessen and three South Dakota bookstores that refused to remove Matthiessen’s book, “In the Spirit of Crazy
Horse,” which contains statements critical of the Governor.
(October 11, 1986)
Matthiessen and his publisher, Viking Penguin, were sued for libel in two states over his book ‘In the Spirit of Crazy Horse.’
(January 16, 1988)
A Federal District Court in Minnesota dismissed the four-year-old libel suit brought against Matthiessen and his publisher, Viking Penguin.
(January 10, 1990)
The Supreme Court refused to consider the libel suit filed against Peter Matthiessen and Viking.
(June 10, 1990)
“Whether writing natural history, travelogue or fiction, he bathes readers in a wash of particulars, establishing the dense reality of an unfamiliar place.”
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