He was 86, at home in Sagaponak, New York, with his wife Maria as well as other family and close friends nearby.

He never stopped working, except when the final illness made work impossible, and his newest book, In Paradise, a novel of Auschwitz, will be published April 8.

He transcended literary categories, much as his older friend Robert Penn Warren had done, embracing the realization that a serious writer need not be just one kind of writer. Matthiessen wrote both fiction and nonfiction, and though he won high recognition for both, he considered fiction the greater art.

His book The Snow Leopard (1978), a meditative travel journal of a foot trek in the Himalaya following the death of his second wife, won