Released 12.12.25

The Conversation

Lance Richardson is a journalist and traveller, and author of an exceptional new biography of Peter Matthiessen. He hadn’t meant his interest in Matthiessen to take this form — originally, he’d intended to do a ‘footsteps’ book about Matthiessen’s travels in search of a snow leopard — but then the many lives of Matthiessen started to take on a momentum of their own. The biography took eight years to complete.

In this episode, we talk about why Matthiessen is such a hard man to “pin down”: a privileged, restless New Yorker who fled an elite upbringing into literature, war-time limbo in Hawaii, and a formative escape to Paris. Lance explains how Matthiessen’s CIA recruitment became the unlikely origin story of The Paris Review, and how that hidden chapter later haunted him as he threw himself into activism and environmental causes.

The conversation moves through Matthiessen’s literary turning points—especially Wildlife in America (1959), which Lance argues anticipated key environmental debates before Silent Spring—and the era when editors like William Shawn at The New Yorker could bankroll long reporting assignments in difficult, distant places. The heart of the discussion is The Snow Leopard: the 1973 Dolpo expedition, the book’s crafted “present-tense” immediacy, and the snow leopard as both animal and symbol of enlightenment. Lance describes retracing the route to Shey Gompa for the biography, the altitude, illness and parasites, and the uncanny feeling of reading Matthiessen’s descriptions against a landscape that is both altered (tin roofs, Coke, clothing) and strangely intact.

“I took a copy of Matthiessen’s field journal,” sayd Lance, “nd I also took The Snow Leopard. And we would stop in the evening and we would read the passages that were applicable to what we had just traversed. And often it was like a ghost following us and just writing about what we were seeing.”

What did Matthiessen teach him? An obsessive, disciplined practice of paying attention to the world.

Image: Sophy Roberts

Books discussed:

Lance Richardson
— True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen

Peter Matthiessen
— The Snow Leopard
— Wildlife in America

Richard Carson
— Silent Spring

Hisham Matar
— The Return
— A Month in Siena