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True Nature
- Author
- Lance Richardson
- Narrator
- Mark Bramhall
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 16 October 2025
- Run Time
- 31 hours 18 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
Discover the many lives of Peter Matthiessen – writer, naturalist, activist, CIA agent, Zen master – in this kaleidoscopic biography of an American literary giant.
Author of The Snow Leopard, co-founder of the Paris Review and the only writer to have ever won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen was a towering figure of twentieth-century American literature. He was also an undercover agent for the fledgling CIA; an environmental activist; an advocate for Native American rights; friends with the likes of Truman Capote and William Styron; and a daring explorer who visited every continent on Earth.
Across these many lives, Matthiessen was always searching for what he called his ‘true nature’, and this spiritual quest ultimately led him to the highest ranks of Zen.
Readers and critics have struggled to reconcile Matthiessen’s extraordinarily varied achievements and literary output. Now, for the first time, drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, acclaimed biographer Lance Richardson pulls together the seemingly disparate threads of Matthiessen’s story. With page-turning immediacy, Richardson illuminates how the writer’s uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism and labour exploitation – to express, eloquently and presciently, that ‘in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge’.
'Magnificent' ROBERT MACFARLANE
'Fascinating' KATHERINE MAY
'Irresistible' KATHERINE BUCKNELL
‘Perceptive and consistently readable’ CAL FLYN
© Lance Richardson 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
Critics Review
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Impressive... a rigorous and balanced account of this restless soul
Spectator
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True Nature is a magnificent achievement: an immense work of scholarship, synthesis and empathy, written throughout with verve and lucidity, which illuminates one of the most fascinating writerly lives of the past century
ROBERT MACFARLANE
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Accomplished... In Richardson’s account there are many Matthiessens and they all get their due
Financial Times
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Exhaustive and insightful
London Review of Books
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A fascinating biography of a writer whose story aches to be told
KATHERINE MAY, author of Wintering
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An irresistible portrait... Some of Matthiessen’s books read like an elegy to the planet, and this biography reads like an elegy to the last of the cool WASP men. It’s quite a story
KATHERINE BUCKNELL, author of Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
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The first biography of the writer, and an engaging one at that, the book narrates how a child of privilege evolved into an esteemed naturalist-writer and a crusader for various left-wing causes... grounded in remarkably candid interviews with Matthiessen’s family members and lovers
The New Yorker
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Richardson portrays the peripatetic life of Matthiessen—a celebrated author, magazine editor, and undercover agent who died in 2014—not as an eclectic series of adventures but as a single, 86-year spiritual quest... [An] elegant and rigorous biography
The Atlantic
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A remarkable achievement... Perceptive and consistently readable
CAL FLYN, author of Islands of Abandonment
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I can't imagine that a fairer, better researched, more elegant biography will come out this year
BENJAMIN MOSER, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Sontag
User Reviews
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Details
- Author
- Lance Richardson
- Narrator
- Mark Bramhall
- Duration
- 31 hours 18 minutes
- Release Date
- 16 October 2025
- ISBN
- 9781529926064
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Biography: writers, Zen Buddhism, Conservation of the environment
Synopsis
Brought to you by Penguin.Discover the many lives of Peter Matthiessen – writer, naturalist, activist, CIA agent, Zen master – in this kaleidoscopic biography of an American literary giant.Author of The Snow Leopard, co-founder of the Paris Review and the only writer to have ever won the National Book Award for both fiction and nonfiction, Peter Matthiessen was a towering figure of twentieth-century American literature. He was also an undercover agent for the fledgling CIA; an environmental activist; an advocate for Native American rights; friends with the likes of Truman Capote and William Styron; and a daring explorer who visited every continent on Earth.Across these many lives, Matthiessen was always searching for what he called his ‘true nature’, and this spiritual quest ultimately led him to the highest ranks of Zen.Readers and critics have struggled to reconcile Matthiessen’s extraordinarily varied achievements and literary output. Now, for the first time, drawing on rich primary sources and hundreds of interviews, acclaimed biographer Lance Richardson pulls together the seemingly disparate threads of Matthiessen’s story. With page-turning immediacy, Richardson illuminates how the writer’s uncanny gifts enabled him to sense connections between ecological decline, racism and labour exploitation – to express, eloquently and presciently, that ‘in a damaged human habitat, all problems merge’.'Magnificent' ROBERT MACFARLANE'Fascinating' KATHERINE MAY'Irresistible' KATHERINE BUCKNELL‘Perceptive and consistently readable’ CAL FLYN© Lance Richardson 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025
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