Word: matta
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Living Character. Shortly after Gary's novel first came out in France in 1956, Gary had a long letter from a game warden living in the Ivory Coast territory of French West Africa. Raphael Matta, a Frenchman of Italian descent, seemed Morel sprung to uncanny life-though Gary and Matta had never met or heard the other's name. Like Morel, Matta had undergone a shattering World War II experience. An exploding land mine almost took his life, and left him totally deaf...
Then one day he visited the Vincennes zoo. There he learned that 600 varieties of mammals are facing extinction; no species have already disappeared from earth just since 1800. Matta was relatively young (30), making $280 a month in an export-import firm in Paris, and marked for advancement. But he never hesitated. He threw over both present prosperity and future prospects to take a $160-a-month job as superintendent of the 2,000,000-acre Bouna game reserve, 500 miles upcountry from Abidjan...