African Silences

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 Long Island, and as captain 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 Mountain Wall, Blue Meridian, Sand Rivers, The Tree where Man Was Born (with Eliot Porter) and The Snow Leopard. Peter Matthiessen has also written eloquently of the fate of the North American Indians in Indian Country and In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, and he is author of several novels, including At Play in the Fields of the Lord, Far Tortuga and Killing Mister Watson, as well as of the acclaimed short story collection On the River Styx.