Free Republic

I've spent the last few months putting together a book on my grandfather, Jack Bell, a prospector who won and lost fortunes from Alaska down to Mexico - naturalist, angler, newspaper and magazine writer, law enforcement. Book's too big. So while I'm figuring out what to do about that, thought I'd put up the occasional story of his to see if people find them interesting. Major categories that might interest you are prospecting/naturalist, fishing, the first air mail pilots, and crime.

Peter Matthiessen, a roving author and naturalist whose impassioned nonfiction explored the remote endangered wilds of the world and whose prize-winning fiction often placed his mysterious protagonists in the heart of them, died on Saturday at his home in Sagaponack, N.Y. He was 86... Mr. Matthiessen was one of the last survivors of a generation of American writers who came of age after World War II and who all seemed to know one another, socializing in New York and on Long Island’s East End as a kind of movable literary salon peopled by the likes of William Styron, James Jones,...