Lance Richardson with Sam Anderson: True Nature

In this episode of Library Talks , author Lance Richardson joins Library Talks to discuss his new book True Nature: The Pilgrimage of Peter Matthiessen. He's joined by award-winning writer Sam Anderson. A towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, Peter Matthiessen (1927–2014) defies categorization. He co-founded the Paris Review while working undercover for the CIA in postwar Paris, then escaped into a series of expeditions that found him floating through the Amazon to recover a fossil or embedding with a tribe in Netherlands New Guinea. His travels inspired prize-winning novels about Caymanian turtle hunters and outlaws in the Florida Everglades. Meanwhile, his legendary nonfiction ranged from influential nature books like Wildlife in America to advocacy journalism supporting Cesar Chavez and Leonard Peltier. Underlying all these disparate pursuits was Matthiessen's existential

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Lance Richardson with Sam Anderson: True Nature is an episode from The New York Public Library Podcast by The New York Public Library.

This episode is 52:21 long.

This episode was published on Dec 17, 2025.

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