An Appreciation: Peter Matthiessen, 1927-2014

Peter Matthiessen experienced the world, up close and personal, in a way few of us ever will. And for the last half of his life, he made the East End of Long Island his home -- whenever he chose to stay put.

Matthiessen, whose final book -- "In Paradise," a novel -- was released last week, died April 5 at his Sagaponack home of leukemia complications. He was 86.

A three-time National Book Award winner, Matthiessen had the singular distinction of earning that prize for both fiction and nonfiction. He won twice, in 1979 and 1980, for "The Snow Leopard," his account of an expedition to the Himalayas in search of the endangered cat. In 2008, he won for "Shadow Country," an 890-page revision of a trilogy about a fictional sugar-cane autocrat in frontier-era Florida.

His local imprint was most directly felt in his longtime participation in the Long Island University Southampton (now Stony Brook Southampton) Writers Conference, where he, along with such luminaries as E.L. Doctorow, Joyce Carol Oates, John Guare, Frank McCourt, Joe Pintauro and Kaylie Jones led graduate master classes. Jones is the daughter of "From Here to Eternity" author James Jones, who, with Matthiessen, was part of a post-World War II coterie of authors who mingled in Manhattan and the East End.

Pintauro, who lives in Sag Harbor, adapted Matthiessen's nonfiction "Men's Lives: The Surfmen and Baymen of the South Fork," as a play. Based on Matthiessen's hands-on work as a waterman, it portrayed the lives of fishermen shunted to the margins by the Hamptons' boom. "Men's Lives" premiered at Bay Street Theatre in 1992 and was revived for the Sag Harbor company's 20th anniversary.

"Peter was an inspiration for me," says Pintauro, who attributes his Zen-Buddhism, in part, to Matthiessen's influence. Of "Men's Lives," he said, "For Peter, it was a book that had to be written -- the destruction of livelihoods, the rapid buying up of land, changing everyman's Arcadia into a suburb."

Matthiessen's life and career was, however, about much more than man's relationship to the natural world. In the 1950s, he and fellow American expatriates co-founded the Paris Review, a literary journal that also served as cover for his moonlighting with the CIA, spying on suspected American Communists.

But writing was Matthiessen's devotion. "I am a writer," he said in a 1999 Paris Review interview. "A fiction writer who also writes nonfiction on behalf of social and environmental causes or journals about expeditions to wild places ...Yet, I am energized by fiction."