When Peter Matthiessen died on April 5 at his home in Sagaponack, The Paris Review lost an inspiring founder and intrepid spirit. To reflect on his life is to see the world’s widest horizons, sometimes detailed in the patterns of color on the wings of his beloved birds.

Peter served the Review for six decades, from planning the first issue in Paris cafés in 1953—when he was fiction editor and contributed a story of his own (“A Replacement”)—to judging this year’s literary prizes. If you had anything to do with the Review over all that time, Peter welcomed you as a colleague and a friend—and how generous that felt, when, everywhere you turned, Peter’s flags flew so high. He was a defender of the natural world and everything in it; an interpreter and translator of all things human, from Stone Age cultures in New Guinea to the modern tribes of the American West; an explorer on every level, from his early experimentation with LSD, which evolved into his study of Zen and practice as a Budd…