Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen was a co-founder of the Paris Review in 1953 (and covertly a CIA operative during its early years, a fact he disclosed later in life). He was also a naturalist of professional quality, a Zen Buddhist who ordained as a priest, and a novelist whose work ranged from the Everglades (At Play in the Fields of the Lord) to Long Island fishermen (Men's Lives).

The Snow Leopard (1978) — his account of a two-month journey through the Nepal Himalaya with the biologist George Schaller to observe the rare bharal sheep and, if possible, the even rarer snow leopard — won both the National Book Award and the distinction of being read by people who don't usually read travel books.

The journey was made fourteen months after the death of Matthiessen's second wife from cancer, and the book is partly about that grief, partly about the attempt to practice Zen Buddhism in conditions that are either ideal or completely hostile to meditation, and partly about what it means to observe the natural world with genuine attention.

He watched for the snow leopard throughout the journey and didn't see one. The ending — which handles this non-event with what might be wisdom or might be resignation — is one of the most discussed passages in American travel writing.

His Amazon journals, collected in The Cloud Forest (1961) and At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965, novel), show the same quality of attention applied to an entirely different landscape.