It’s the birthday of author, naturalist, and one-time CIA agent Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014, #nicelonglife), the only person ever to win National Book Awards for both fiction and nonfiction: Shadow Country (2008) for fiction, and The Snow Leopard (1978) for nonfiction. Matthiessen has been called “our greatest modern nature writer in the lyrical tradition” (Stephen Jay Gould).

Matthiessen was born in Manhattan and grew up in a home overlooking Central Park. He served in the Navy from 1945-47 and was at Pearl Harbor; after the war, he studied English at Yale and spent his junior year at the Sorbonne in Paris. At the time, Yale was chock full o’ spies, and one of them talked Matthiessen into joining the CIA in 1951. Matthiessen travelled to Paris using his writing as a cover—he was working on his novel Race Rock (1954)—but needed a stronger cover and came up with the idea of founding The Paris Review, though he later maintained that the CIA did not in any way fund the effort. (You know how you feel when you find out years after the fact that some perfectly ordinary colleague who used to steal your yogurt from the work fridge was actually a secret agent? That’s how co-founder George Plimpton felt when he found out about Matthiessen. Probably.)

Matthiessen ditched the CIA within a couple of years. He and his first wife moved to Long Island to raise their children. Matthiessen worked as a fisherman and ran a charter boat in the summers and wrote in the winters; he and his first wife divorced in 1956, soon after his second novel, Partisans, came out. Matthiessen began traveling widely, visiting every wildlife refuge in the U.S., and writing nonfiction, including Wildlife in America (1959), a history of threatened and extinct animals in North America and man’s role in their destruction. He would go on to write more than 15 nonfiction books about nature and its endangerment everywhere from the Amazon to Tanzania.

Matthiessen remarried in 1963 but was widowed less than 10 years later when his second wife died of cancer. By then, Matthiessen had already embraced Zen Buddhism, eventually becoming a priest. He remarried again in 1980 and lived with his wife in Sagaponack, New York, until his death at the age of 86. Matthiessen’s final novel, In Paradise (2014), follows a group who gathers at a former German death camp for prayer and meditation, attempting to grapple on some level with the unspeakable horrors of Auschwitz. Before writing the novel, Matthiessen attended three such retreats at Auschwitz himself. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/books/peter-matthiessen-author-and-naturalist-is-dead-at-86.html

Have a fine Wednesday, find what lyricism you can in light and dark places, and stay scrupulously honest to the data.