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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * "Altogether gripping, shocking, and brilliantly told, not just a tour de force in its stylistic range, but a great American novel, as powerful a reading experience as nearly any in our literature." - Michael Dirda, The New York Review of Books Killing Mister Watson, Lost Mans River, and Bone by Bone - Peter Matthiessens great American epic about Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson on the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century - were originally conceived as one vast, mysterious novel. Now, in this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has marvelously distilled a monumental work while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. Praise for Shadow Country "Magnificent . . . breathtaking . . . Finally now we have [this three-part saga] welded like a bell, and with Watsons song the last sound, all the elements fuse and resonate." - Los Angeles Times"Peter Matthiessen has done great things with the Watson trilogy. Its the story of our continent, both land and people, and his writing does every justice to the blood fury of his themes." - Don DeLillo "The fiction of Peter Matthiessen is the reason a lot of people in my generation decided to be writers. No doubt about it. Shadow Country lives up to anyones highest expectations for great writing." - Richard Ford "Shadow Country, Matthiessens distillation of the earlier Watson saga, represents his original vision. It is the quintessence of his lifelong concerns, and a great legacy." - W. S. Merwin "[An] epic masterpiece . . . a great American novel." - The Miami Herald
About the Author
Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 - April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was a 2008 National Book Award winner. He was also a prominent environmental activist. His nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978) and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983) . His fiction was 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.In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume, 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that had been published in the 1990s. 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."Matthiessen was treated for acute leukemia for more than a year. His death came as he awaited publication of his final novel, In Paradise on April 8. Bio from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Photo by Melissa Eagan, WNYC New York Public Radio (http://www.flickr.com/photos/wnyc/2565449584/) [CC BY 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0) ], via Wikimedia Commons.