Peter Matthiessen, a writer who's works include "The Snow Leopard" and "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," passed away from leukemia on April 5, 2014. He was 86. Matthiessen helped found The Paris Review, one of the most influential literary magazines, and won National Book Awards for "The Snow Leopard," his spiritual account of the Himalayas, and for the novel "Shadow Country." Peter was a leading environmentalist and wilderness writer, who embraced the best and worst that nature could bring him, whether trekking across the Himalayas, parrying sharks in Australia or enduring a hurricane in Antarctica. Peter wrote a defense of Indian activist Leonard Peltier, "In the Spirit of Crazy Horse," that led to a highly publicized, and unsuccessful, lawsuit by an FBI agent who claimed Matthiessen had defamed him. Peter had just completed his 2014 work entitled "In Paradise" which was inspired by a visit in the 1990s he made to Auschwitz. Matthiessen became a Zen Buddhist in the 1960s, and was later a Zen priest. Matthiessen was born in New York in 1927, the son of Erard A. Matthiessen, a wealthy architect and conservationist. While attending Yale, Peter wrote the short story "Sadie," which appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he soon acquired an agent. After graduation he moved to Paris and, along with fellow writer-adventurer George Plimpton, helped found The Paris Review. Matthiessen would later acknowledge he was a CIA recruit at the time and used his work with the Review as a cover. In the mid-1950s he returned to the United States, moved to Long Island's Sag Harbor, socialized with Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and other painters, operated a deep-sea fishing charter boat — and wrote. Matthiessen's early novels were short, tentative efforts: "Race Rock," "Raditzer" and "Partisans," which features a wealthy young man who confides "his ignorance of human misery." In need of money, Matthiessen also wrote for such magazines as Holiday and Sports Illustrated. In 1961, Matthiessen became a major novelist with "At Play in the Fields of the Lord," his tale of missionaries under siege from both natives and mercenaries in the jungles of Brazil. The book was later adapted into a film of the same name, starring John Lithgow and Daryl Hannah. He wrote many other books, including "Far Tortuga," a novel told largely in dialect about a doomed crew of sailors on the Caribbean; "The Tree Where Man Was Born," a highly regarded chronicle of his travels in East Africa. In the 1980s and '90s, Matthiessen published a trio of novels — "Killing Mr. Watson," "Lost Man's River" and "Bone by Bone" — about a community in Florida's Everglades at the turn of the 20th century and a predatory planter. These three novels were condensed into "Shadow Country," published in 2008 and a National Book Award winner. Much of his fiction, from "At Play in the Fields of the Lord" to "Bone by Bone," bestowed a lion-like aura upon nature — grand when respected, dangerous when provoked, tragic when exploited. "There's an elegiac quality in watching (American wilderness) go, because it's our own myth, the American frontier, that's deteriorating before our eyes," he once wrote. "I feel a deep sorrow that my kids will never get to see what I've seen, and their kids will see nothing; there's a deep sadness whenever I look at nature now." Matthiessen was married three times, most recently to Maria Eckhart, whom he wed in 1980. He had four children, two each from his first two marriages, and two stepchildren from his third marriage.