“Travelin Man” was originally published (as “Traveling Man”) in the February 1957 issue of Harper's Magazine. It was reprinted in Midnight Turning Gray (1984), and is currently most readily available in On the River Styx and Other Stories (Vintage).

When “Travelin Man,” a story by Peter Matthiessen, was published in Harper's Magazine in 1957, it won an O. Henry Prize. It was one of the earliest of Matthiessen's publications. Eventually, the story appeared in a small press edition, Midnight Turning Gray, and, finally, in On the River Styx, the excellent Random House collection which includes what are in my judgment Matthiessen's best stories, “Lumumba Lives” and “On the River Styx.” In my copy of Midnight Turning Gray, Matthiessen inscribed, ”… from a fledgling author.” Hardly. Though in a hint of melodrama here, a touch of heavy-handed symbolism there—very few instances, really—“Travelin Man,” beautifully balanced as it is, can feel like a young story—the author was just thirty. What is remarkable, however, is that “Travelin Man” already contains Matthiessen's mature themes—his preoccupations with race, landscape, the powerful articulation of the unlettered voice—that would inform his writing for the next fifty years. In a conversation partly about “Travelin Man” in particular, his stories in general, in the Lennox Hotel in New York City, I asked Matthiessen how large Faulkner loomed for writers of his generation. (Matthiessen was born in 1927.) “For some of us, very large,” he replied. “He cast a wide shadow. That shadow falls over ‘Travelin Man’ to some extent, I suppose, as well as my first published story, ‘Sadie.’ But keep in mind, I've always written about race, about backwater peoples, about the way landscape penetrates people's lives, their psyches. It's all throughout the Watson books.”

Minor literary influences aside, “Travelin Man,” too, already contains Matthiessen's inimitable use of landscape. I don't mean just physical description of a given topography, not just a “sense of place.” I mean that no writer since Conrad has so inventively and insistently involved landscape with his characters’ fates as Matthiessen. In “Travelin Man,” for instance, the Carolina coastal swamps and Deep River not only house the action of the story, but are themselves an intensifying agent.