"Peter Matthiessen Travelled the World Trying to Escape Himself" by Visiting Lecturer Maggie Doherty

On November 20, 1959, at a pier in Brooklyn, the writer Peter Matthiessen boarded the M.V. Venimos, a freighter bound for Iquitos, a port town deep in the Peruvian Amazon. He was fresh off the publication of "Wildlife in America," a travelogue-cum-polemic that lavished attention on the endangered species of North America, indicted the humans who had destroyed their habitats, and established Matthiessen as a nature writer in the tradition of Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. Now he was ready for wilder climes. As Matthiessen stepped across the ship's gray deck, the writer William Styron, his close friend, looked on with admiration. More than twenty years later, Styron recalled the scene: "He might have been going no farther than Staten Island, so composed did he seem, rather than to uttermost jungle fastnesses where God knows what beast and dark happenings would imperile his hide." 

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