Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen studied at Yale, co-founded The Paris Review in Paris in 1953 (a magazine that partly served as cover for a brief stint with the CIA, a fact he kept secret for decades), and spent much of his life traveling to the world's remotest wildernesses, writing acclaimed nonfiction including The Snow Leopard, itself a National Book Award winner.

His fiction returned repeatedly to the Florida Everglades' violent frontier history, culminating in a trilogy about the real early-twentieth-century planter and outlaw Edgar J. Watson, killed by his own neighbors under disputed circumstances. In 2008 Matthiessen condensed and revised the three novels into Shadow Country, a single volume reconstructing Watson's life and death through multiple conflicting witnesses; it won the National Book Award, an unprecedented distinction for a substantially reworked earlier work.

He remained a committed Zen Buddhist and environmental activist until his death from leukemia in Sagaponack, New York, in 2014, having published across fiction, natural history, and reportage for over six decades.