Author Peter Matthiessen, stands in the courtyard of his house in Sagaponack, N.Y.., 28 October 2004 Matthiessen, 77, is the author of numerous books, including the novel "at play in the fields of the Lord" and the non-fiction work, "Snow Leopard". (AP Photo/Ed Betz). ASSOCIATED PRESS
NEW YORK (AP) Kelley Macdonald, son of a rich man, a life of leisure spurned and taken extraordinary physical and mental characters at the produce acclaimed books such as "the Snow Leopard" and "At play in the fields of the Lord," died Saturday. He was 86.
His publisher, by Riverhead books Matthiessen, Geoff Kloske said, the leukemia had been diagnosed, was sick "for a few months." He died in a hospital in the vicinity from his home on long Iceland.
"Peter was a force of nature, relentlessly curious, stubborn, demanding - from themselves and others," his literary agent Neil Olson, said in a statement. "But he was also funny, wise and compassionate."
A variety of services could take some authors. Macdonald helped the Paris review, one of the most influential literary magazines, and won the National Book Award, for "the Snow Leopard" his spiritual account of the Himalayas, and the novel "shadow land." A leading environmentalist and wilderness writer, he embraced the best and worst that could bring him the nature whether sharks in Australia or permanently one trekking through the Himalayas, Parry hurricane in Antarctica.
He was also a longtime Liberal, the Cesar Chavez friend and wrote a defense of Indian activist Leonard Peltier, "in the spirit of Crazy Horse,", which heavily publicized one unsuccessful lawsuit by an FBI agent led the Matthiessen claimed it had defamed.
"In paradise," which he expected to be his last novel, will be published next week. The book was inspired by a visit in the 1990s he made years after Auschwitz.
"Blown up the gas chambers all were at the end of the war, so they simply are these grim-looking pale ruins in the distance," he said in an interview NPR. "It is a very dark scene. "And so it is the enormity of it, which only numbs you for the first time."
Matthiessen was a Zen-Buddhist in the 1960s, and a Zen priest who met daily with a different group of practitioners in a meditation hut, converted later that he from an old barn. The granite-faced author, robust and sporty seemed in his 80s, a modern version of the Buddhist legend, a child of permissions that are changed by the discovery of suffering to live.
Matthiessen, the son of Erard A. Matthiessen, a wealthy architect and conservationist born in New York in the year 1927. "The depression had no serious effect on our well-insulated family" the author would write later.
While at Yale, he wrote the short story "Sadie", appeared in the magazine Atlantic Monthly, and he soon acquired an agent. After his graduation he moved to Paris and, along with friend writer-adventurer George Plimpton, helped found the Paris review. (Macdonald would later acknowledge, he was a CIA recruit at the time and his work with the review used as camouflage).
The magazine on the train caught on, but Paris reminds only Matthiessen, he was an American writer. Mid-1950s, he returned to the United States, Iceland moved long Harbor (where he eventually lived on six acres) say socialized with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other painters used a deep sea fishing charter boat- and wrote.
"Macdonald the early novels were short, timid efforts:" race rock, ""Raditzer"and"Partisans", which features a wealthy young man, the familiar"his ignorance of human misery." Cash-strapped Matthiessen also wrote for magazines such as holiday and sports illustrated.
1961, Matthiessen was besieged a great writer with "At play in the fields of the Lord," his history of the missionaries by natives and mercenaries in the jungles of Brazil. The detailed depiction of a man's hallucinations brought him a letter of praise from LSD guru Timothy Leary. The book was later charged with the same name which starring John Lithgow and Daryl Hannah.
He wrote many books, including "far Tortuga," a novel told largely in dialect one damn crew of sailors on the Caribbean; "The tree where man was born," a highly respected Chronicle of his travels in East Africa.
In the 1980s and 1990s, Matthiessen published a trio of novels - "Killing Mr. Watson," "you lost river"and"bone by bone" - about a municipality in Florida Everglades at the turn of the 20th century and the predatory planter. " Dissatisfied, especially with "Lost Man River", spent it the years revise and condensing all three books in "shadow country", published in 2008, and a surprise National Book Award winner.
Although a researcher in the Hemingway tradition, look not Matthiessen, conquer nature, but to preserve it. in 1959, he published his uniquely prone to self-destruction first non-fiction book "Wildlife in America," where he man "the highest predator" and one labels.
Much of his fiction, from "At play in the fields of the Lord" to "bone by bone," awarded a lion-like aura nature - grand when respected, dangerous when provoked, tragic when exploited.
"There is an elegiac quality see (American wilderness) go, because it is worse, our own myth of the American frontier, before our very eyes" he once wrote. "I feel a deep sorrow, my children never get to see what I've seen, and their children see nothing; There a deep sadness when I see nature now."
Matthiessen was three times, most recently with Mary Eckhart, married, the he in 1980 MI. He had four children, two from his first two marriages and two stepchildren from his third marriage.
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