The Cloud Forest: A Chronicle of the South American Wilderness was published by Viking Press in 1961 and records a long journey Matthiessen made through South America in 1960 — from the Mato Grosso of Brazil through Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador to the far south. It is his first travel book, written in the direct, observant style that would become his signature, and it provided the raw material for his novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965).
The Journey
Matthiessen traveled by canoe, on foot, by bush plane, and by mule through some of the most remote territory in the Western Hemisphere. The book moves through distinct landscapes and encounters:
The Amazon basin — river travel among indigenous peoples, observations of forest ecology, encounters with missionaries and settlers whose presence signals the beginning of the end for uncontacted communities.
The Andes — highland travel through Bolivia and Peru, the ancient Inca roads, the mining towns, the altitude and cold.
The cloud forests — the fog-draped montane forests of the eastern Andean slopes, extraordinarily biodiverse and, in 1960, still largely unexplored by Western scientists.
Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego — the far south, wind-blasted and empty, the end of the continental road.
Method
Matthiessen’s travel writing operates by accumulation of precise observation. He does not construct grand arguments or impose narrative arcs; he records what he sees — birds, plants, peoples, weather, terrain — with the patient attention of a naturalist and the ear of a literary writer. The prose is spare, unpretentious, and quietly beautiful.
The book also documents indigenous peoples at a particular moment of contact — missionaries establishing posts, governments building roads, the frontier of “civilization” advancing into the last uncontacted territories. Matthiessen observes this process with evident ambivalence: he sees both the genuine human needs the missionaries address and the cultural destruction they inevitably cause.
Relationship to Later Work
The Cloud Forest is the seedbed of At Play in the Fields of the Lord. The missionaries, the mercenary pilots, the indigenous peoples under pressure — all appear first as observed realities in the travel book before being transformed into fiction. Reading the two books together reveals how Matthiessen’s creative process worked: patient observation of reality, followed by imaginative transformation.
It also anticipates The Snow Leopard (1978) in its method — the journey as both physical and spiritual, the natural world as both scientific subject and source of transcendence.
Collecting The Cloud Forest
First edition (Viking Press, New York, 1961): Green cloth binding. Dust jacket with jungle/mountain imagery.
Identification points:
- Viking Press imprint
- “First published in 1961” stated
- 280 pages
- Maps
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$250. Not a rare book, but fine copies with unfaded, unclipped jackets are genuinely uncommon.
Signed copies: $300–$500.
The book is primarily collected as an early Matthiessen work — the beginning of the travel-and-nature-writing career that would produce The Snow Leopard. Its connection to At Play in the Fields of the Lord gives it added interest for readers tracing the evolution of that novel.