Peter Matthiessen and Ecological Imagination offers an ecocritical reading of the Watson
Trilogy - Killing Mister Watson (1990) Lost Man's River (1997) and Bone By Bone (1999) -
which draws together themes Matthiessen has been exploring both in his fiction and nonfiction.
While this study argues that his ecological imagination comes from his unique experience as a
novelist naturalist environmentalist social activist and a student of Zen it also
illustrates that for Matthiessen economic political social racial psychological
epistemological and ecological issues are all inseparably interconnected. Set in the
Everglades frontier in the formative era of American industrial capitalism Matthiessen's
novels are his grand attempt to reexamine the root causes of ecological disaster in the region
and the costs to the people and the land that accompanied the conquering of the frontier.
