Peter Matthiessen is a three-time National Book Award-winning American novelist and non-fiction writer, as well as an environmental activist. His nonfiction has featured nature and travel, as in The Snow Leopard . Or American Indian issues and history, as in his detailed study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse . His story "Travelin' Man" was adapted by Luis Buñuel as the film The Young One . Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction in November 2008, at age 81, for Shadow Country, an 890-page revision of three novels set in frontier Florida that... were published in the 1990s. For The Snow Leopard he won the 1979 Award in category Contemporary Thought and the 1980 Award in category Nonfiction . Along with George Plimpton, Harold L. Humes, Thomas Guinzburg and Donald Hall, in 1953 Matthiessen founded the literary magazine The Paris Review. At the time he was working for the CIA.
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