The only person to win a National Book Award for both non-fiction (“The Snow Leopard”) and fiction (“Shadow Country”), Peter Matthiessen wrote about “last” wildernesses inhabited by pre-industrial people, environmental degradation, wildlife preservation, racism, Cesar Chavez’s United Farm Workers and Native American rights.

A seeker and Zen Master, Matthiessen found the possibility of “primordial intuition” perhaps the only consolation “to this haunted animal that wastes most of a long and ghostly life wandering the future and the past on its hind legs, looking for meanings, only to see in the eyes of others of its kind that it must die.”

In “True Nature,” Lance Richardson, an instructor in Bennington College’s Writing Program and the author of “House of Nutter,” draws on a treasure trov

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