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New York State Writers Institute - Peter Matthiessen, State Author A year after his election to the National Institute of Arts and Letters (now the American Academy of Arts and Letters) in 1974, Matthiessen published his fifth novel, Far Tortuga. Widely considered to be his most inventive work of fiction, it is experimental in form, consisting mainly of dialogue with varied typographic formats. It relates the doomed voyage of a group of sailors who leave the Cayman Islands to hunt turtles in the Caribbean