11/10/99

Diane Manuel, News Service (650) 725-1945; e-mail: dmanuel@leland.stanford.edu

Writer Peter Matthiessen to speak on Nov. 15

Writer Peter Matthiessen will be the first of three major authors to visit Stanford this year under the auspices of the Creative Writing Program's Jean and Bill Lane Lecture Series. A highlight of the academic calendar for 17 years, the series recently was permanently endowed by the Lanes.

Matthiessen will give a public reading of his work at 8 p.m. Monday, Nov. 15, in Kresge Auditorium. The following day there will be an informal symposium with Matthiessen at 11 a.m. in the Terrace Room of Margaret Jacks Hall.

The reading and the question-and-answer session are free and open to the public.

Matthiessen was born in New York in 1927. He attended Hotchkiss, Yale University and the Sorbonne. In 1951 he became one of the founders of The Paris Review.

Matthiessen has written more than a dozen books of fiction and nonfiction. His best known novels include At Play in the Fields of the Lord and Far Tortuga. Matthiessen's latest novel, Lost Man's River, completes a trilogy that took 20 years to finish. His lifelong concern with environmental and social issues has resulted in such powerful works as In the Spirit of Crazy Horse, The Tree Where Man was Born and The Snow Leopard, which received the National Book Award. Matthiessen lives on Long Island, New York.

Additional visitors in the 1999-2000 Lane Lecture Series will be fiction writer Tim O'Brien on Feb. 10 and poet Louise Gluck on April 17.

For more information call 725-1208.

-30-

By