I was just very interested in the American frontier and the growth of capitalism - those enormous fortunes that were being made, more often than not, on the blood of poor people, black people, Indian people. They were the ones who paid very dearly for those great fortunes.

In 1965 Matthiessen publiPeter Matthiessend At Play in the Fields of the Lord a novel about a group of American missionaries and their encounter with a South American indigenous tribe. Before practicing Zen Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. A.

According to critic Michael Dirda "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops savannas and the sea. His nonfiction has featured nature and travel -- notably The Snow Leopard (1978) -- or American Indian issues and history -- notably a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction has occasionally been adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Buñuel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name.