Word: matthiessen
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...writing career including Africa, war, nature, creativity and despair." The many panelists were great writers and journeymen, both: the Nobel laureates Saul Bellow, Nadine Gordimer, Kenzaburo Oe and Derek Walcott as well as critically and popularly acclaimed authors E. Annie Proulx, Tobias Wolff, Chinua Achebe, Frederick Busch, Peter Matthiessen, George Plimpton and dozens of others. A hundred years after Hemingway's birth and 38 years after his death, the subject of the conference was how Hemingway has held up--not just his works, but necessarily the man himself. What is so striking about the Hemingway photograph I have discussed...
Environmentalist Peter Matthiessen's latest novel, Bone by Bone, is due out in April
...when I walked down sand-and-weed roads in Cape Cod and felt the sea grass brush against my thighs. I never studied nature, and I do not now. The closest I have come to study is to reread the great nature writers--David Quammen, Edward Hoagland, Peter Matthiessen, Annie Dillard and the poet Ted Hughes--and to pick up some sensory information through their wide-open eyes...
Lost Man's River is another kind of troublesome sequel, a second swat at an obsession that has buzzed around the author's head for a decade or more. Killing Mister Watson, published in 1990, was Matthiessen's impressive, exasperating novel about the shooting, in 1910, of a man named E. J. Watson, by a mob of angry townsmen in southwest Florida. Was Watson a hardworking planter and family man who paid his bills and helped his neighbors, or a bar brawler and casual gunman who killed his hired hands rather than pay them at the end of the cane...
...Watson episode is at least partly factual. Matthiessen excels at writing nonfiction, but he seems uncomfortable inventing the astonishments--the outrageous lies--that keep novels afloat. Perhaps for this reason, he locked his readers away from E.J. Watson and the central drama. He presented his novel as a sheaf of tortuous, conflicting depositions by participants and onlookers that left the truth about the enigmatic Watson untold. Lost Man's River carries the puzzle forward, but in doing so withdraws an additional 50 years from the event. Lucius Watson, one of E.J.'s sons, by now an elderly, self-apologetic historian...