The Snow Leopard

Peter Matthiessen, naturalist, explorer, novelist, was born in New York City in 1927 and graduated from Yale University in 1950. He also attended the Sorbonne and, in the 1950s, co-founded the Paris Review. He worked for three years as a commercial fisherman on the ocean haul seine crews at the Eastern end of Lond Island, and as a captain of a charter fishing boat. His many expeditions to the wilderness areas of the world have taken him to Alaska, the Canadian Northwest Territories, Asia, Australia, Oceania, South America, Africa, New Guinea, and Nepal - memorably described in such books as The Cloud Forest, Under the Moutnain Wall, Blue Meridian, Sand Rivers, The Tree where Man was Born (with Eliot Porter), African Silences and above all, The Snow Leopard. Peter Mattiessen has aslo written eloquently of the fate of the North American Indians in Indian Coutnry and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse; and he is the author of several novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Killing Mister Watson, and of the acclaimed short story collection On the River Styx.