Nature writer and novelist Peter Matthiessen was born in New York City on May 22, 1927. He graduated from Yale University in 1950. He worked as a commercial fisherman and the captain of a charter fishing boat and made several scientific expeditions to Alaska, Peru and New Guinea. He and Harold L. Humes founded the Paris Review, and Matthiessen was its first fiction editor. Matthiessen's nature books include "Wildlife in America," "The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness" and "Under the Mountain Wall." His fiction includes "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," which was made into a movie starring Tom Berenger and was nominated for the National Book Award. Matthiessen's other awards include the John Burroughs Medal and the African Wildlife Leadership Foundation Award.
