At Play in the Fields of the Lord was published by Random House in November 1965, nominated for the National Book Award, and established Peter Matthiessen as a novelist of the first rank — not merely the nature writer and travel author he was already known to be. Set in the fictional South American country of Madre de Dios, it tells the story of two groups of outsiders who descend upon the Niaruna Indians: evangelical missionaries determined to save their souls, and mercenary pilots hired to bomb them off their land.
The Novel
The novel follows two converging plots:
Lewis Meriwether Moon — a half-Cheyenne mercenary pilot stranded in Madre de Dios with his partner Wolfie. Moon is hired to strafe the Niaruna from the air but instead, in a hallucinatory decision fueled by ayahuasca, strips naked, paints himself, and parachutes into the jungle to live among them. His attempt to “become Indian” — to recover an authenticity his mixed blood and American upbringing denied him — is the novel’s most radical gesture.
The Quarriers and the Hubens — two missionary couples. Martin Quarrier is sincere, intelligent, and ultimately destroyed by his own good intentions. Leslie Huben is a muscular Christian, aggressive and self-righteous. Their wives — Hazel Quarrier and Andy Huben — suffer different forms of dissolution in the jungle: madness and sexual awakening.
The Niaruna themselves are not romanticized — they are a people with their own internal politics, their own violence, their own complexity. But they are also clearly doomed. The novel’s tragic structure is that every form of contact — mercenary, missionary, or romantic — destroys them.
Themes
The book’s central question is whether any encounter between civilizations can avoid being an act of violence. The missionaries want to “save” the Niaruna by destroying their culture. Moon wants to “join” them by appropriating their identity. The mercenaries want to “remove” them for profit. Even the most sympathetic characters participate in destruction.
Matthiessen draws on his own extensive travels in the Amazon (documented in The Cloud Forest, 1961) and his growing environmental consciousness. The destruction of indigenous peoples and the destruction of the natural world are presented as the same process — civilization’s fundamental inability to leave anything alone.
Film Adaptation
Hector Babenco directed a film version in 1991 starring Tom Berenger (as Moon), John Lithgow (as Quarrier), and Daryl Hannah (as Andy Huben). Shot on location in the Brazilian Amazon, it was an ambitious but commercially unsuccessful production. The novel’s interior complexities — Moon’s consciousness, the play of faith and doubt — resist cinematic translation.
Collecting At Play in the Fields of the Lord
First edition (Random House, New York, 1965): Brown cloth binding with gold lettering. Dust jacket with jungle imagery in green and gold.
Identification points:
- “First Printing” stated on copyright page
- Random House colophon
- 373 pages
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $200–$500. The National Book Award nomination and Matthiessen’s growing literary stature support steady demand.
Signed copies: $500–$1,200. Matthiessen was a generous signer at literary events throughout his career.
Advance Reading Copies: Uncommon and sought by serious Matthiessen collectors ($300–$600).
The novel occupies a special place in the ecological fiction canon — alongside works by Edward Abbey, Barry Lopez, and Wendell Berry. Its combination of literary ambition, anthropological seriousness, and environmental consciousness gives it crossover appeal.