The 40th Annual
Corle Lecture:
Peter Matthiessen
On Sunday, November 24, 2002, Campbell Hall filled with over 500 people anxious to hear the author, Michael Chabon. The 2001 Pulitzer Prize winner took the
audience back to their childhood as he compared his childhood memories to the opportunities children have today. His lecture filled with exploration and
imagination was sheer delight.
This year the library has recently announced the 40th Corle
lecturer, Peter Matthiessen. Born in New York City in 1927, novelist Peter Matthiessen is a short story and non-fiction writer who bases the majority of his writing on
personal travels. His writing focuses on vanishing cultures, oppressed peoples, and exotic
wildlife and landscapes. He translates his scientific observation with intellectual prose that connects the world of art and the world of natural sciences.
Matthiessen’s most recent book, The Birds of
Heaven, archives his many journeys in search of the world's fifteen species of cranes. His travels take him from India, then on to Australia, Africa, and western Europe, and finally to
Wisconsin, Nebraska, the Gulf Coast, and Florida, where ingenious efforts are under way to establish a non-migratory
population of the rare whooping crane.
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| Author Peter Matthiessen shown with the front cover of his most recent book, The Birds of Heaven. |
Matthiessen spent much of his life in places at best ignored and at worst unwanted by the
contemporary world. His accounts over the past forty years of wildlife and human lives in Peru, Nepal, New Guinea, and the Americas have earned him three National Book Award nominations, a 1979 National Book Award for
The Snow Leopard, and a permanent place in the White House Library.
Peter Matthiessen will be lecturing in
Campbell Hall on April 23, 2003
at 8:00 p.m. A reception for Matthiessen
will be sponsored by the Friends of the Library held in the
library prior to the lecture. Please see the Friends' newsletter
page for reception details.
The Edwin & Jean Corle Memorial Lectures were begun in 1964 and are sustained by the Edwin Corle fund, established by Jean Armstrong Corle in 1983.
Previous lectures here include: N. Scott Momaday, Ray Bradbury, Wallace Stegner, and Walter Mosley.
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