The Tree Where Man Was Born was published by E.P. Dutton in 1972, with photographs by Eliot Porter in the original edition, and was nominated for the National Book Award. It records Matthiessen’s travels in East Africa — Kenya, Tanzania, Sudan — during the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it is far more than travel writing. It is a sustained meditation on the African landscape as the place where humanity originated, on the vanishing of both traditional peoples and wildlife, and on what is lost when the last wild places are domesticated.
The Book
Matthiessen moves through multiple African landscapes — the Serengeti, the Ngorongoro Crater, the Sudan’s Dinka country, the forests of the eastern Congo, Lake Rudolf (now Lake Turkana) — observing wildlife, living among pastoralist peoples, and recording a world in accelerating transformation.
The writing operates on multiple registers simultaneously:
Natural history — precise observation of animals, landscapes, and ecological systems. Matthiessen identifies species, records behavior, notes population changes with the accuracy of a trained naturalist.
Anthropology — sustained engagement with the Hadza, the Dinka, the Masai, and other peoples whose ways of life are being transformed by modernity. Matthiessen observes without condescension and without sentimentality.
Meditation — recurring reflection on human origins, on what it means to stand in the landscape where the species began, on the relationship between wilderness and consciousness.
Elegy — the book is haunted by loss. The wildlife is diminishing. The pastoral peoples are being settled and “modernized.” The wilderness itself is shrinking. Matthiessen knows he is recording a world in its final form.
Context
The book belongs to a golden age of African nature writing — alongside Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa, Laurens van der Post’s African books, and Aldo Leopold’s ecological essays. But Matthiessen’s perspective is distinctive: he sees Africa not as romantic adventure or colonial playground but as the human homeland — the place where everything we are began.
His ecological consciousness is sharper than his predecessors’. Writing in the early 1970s, he is already aware that conservation in Africa is failing, that population pressure and political instability are destroying what preservation efforts cannot protect. This gives the book its elegiac quality — it is a portrait of what was already being lost.
Collecting The Tree Where Man Was Born
First edition (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1972): Green cloth binding. Dust jacket with African landscape photograph. The original edition includes Eliot Porter’s photographs.
Identification points:
- “First Edition” stated on copyright page
- E.P. Dutton imprint
- Photographs by Eliot Porter throughout
- Large format
Market values: Fine copies in dust jacket with Porter photographs bring $100–$300. The large format and photographic content make truly fine copies uncommon.
Signed copies: $300–$600.
Later editions without Porter’s photographs are significantly less collected — the photographs are integral to the original conception.
The National Book Award nomination and Matthiessen’s status as America’s foremost nature writer support steady interest from both literary collectors and natural-history enthusiasts.