Restlessness is deeply rooted in American mythology. We are a country of pilgrims, engaged in a lifelong search for what Ralph Waldo Emerson called an “original relation to the universe”—a unique understanding of the world that doesn’t rely on the traditions or teachings of past generations. Those who internalize this expectation will walk, trek, and seek—anything to shed an inherited skin and find an undiscovered self they can inhabit. If only skin, inherited or not, were so easy to shed. As Emerson wrote, “My giant goes with me wherever I go.”
Few have embodied this supposedly American quality with more complexity than the writer Peter Matthiessen. And few have captured it with more clarity than Lance Richardson in his new biography of Matthiessen, True Nature. Richardson portrays the peripatetic life of Matthiessen—a celebrated author, magazine editor, and undercover agent who died in 2014—not as an eclectic series of adventures but as a single, 86-year spiritual quest. As he writes, Matthiessen’s “inner journey determined the choices he made throughout his long life; it is the string on which the various beads of his career were strung.” Matthiessen fled his monied upbringing in a flawed yet fascinating attempt to escape the person the world expected him to be.
The central
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