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NEW YORK (AP) — Celebrated nature and travel author Edward Hoagland, known for crafting vivid narratives despite significant visual impairment, has passed away at the age of 93.
His daughter, Molly Magid Hoagland, confirmed his passing on February 17 at a Manhattan assisted living facility, without disclosing the cause.
Hoagland, drawing inspiration from figures like John Muir and Michel de Montaigne, authored numerous books and articles that transported readers to far-flung locales and challenging climates. His writing style was conversational and meandering, echoing the unpredictable routes of his expeditions. An essay might begin with musings on bears’ quirky traits—such as their solitary nature and lethargy—then segue into the routines of game wardens, delve into the history of tracking devices, and circle back to the nesting behaviors of bears.
In the essay “Bears, Bears, Bears,” he described observing a bear: “We watched a female preparing a small basket-shaped sanctum under the upturned roots of a white pine, from which she sneaked, like a hurrying, portly child, cycling downwind to identify us before clearing out.”
Hoagland’s adventures took him hiking along Yellowstone’s southern edge, observing penguins jostling for space near Antarctica, and documenting the evolution of the hippie movement in rural Vermont, where he spent part of each year. His essay “The Courage of Turtles” remains a standout, capturing the intricate social interactions of turtles: “Turtles cough, burp, whistle, grunt, and hiss, and produce social judgments. They put their heads together amicably enough, but then one drives the other back with the suddenness of two dogs who have been conversing in tones too low for an onlooker to hear.”
His honors included National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle nominations, a Lannan Literary Award and membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Open about his physical and other personal troubles, he was admired by Philip Roth, Joyce Carol Oates and Annie Proulx among others and was praised at length by Francine Prose in a 2017 essay in The New York Review of Books.
“Among the striking aspects of Hoagland’s work,” Prose wrote, “have been the honesty and fearlessness with which he has discussed his own heartbreaks, mistakes, and failures, the clarity with which he has argued his nuanced, complex opinions, and the apparent effortlessness with which he has portrayed creatures and habitats for which a less observant writer or less gifted stylist might have trouble finding language.
A world viewed through hazy eyes
Hoagland’s renown as an observer was notable in part because for much of his adult life he had a hazy sense of what he was seeing. Damaged cataracts left him with poor vision until his sight was corrected, at least temporarily, by eye surgery in his 50s.
“When the doctor took off my bandage there was no ‘Eureka, I can see,’ because I’d never been stone-blind,” he wrote in the memoir “Compass Points,” published in 2001. “Instead, just an abrupt, astounding discovery of how bright light actually is. Not at first the beauty of the world, but the brightness of the world, as my eye squinted and winced, shutting out most of the sights now hammering at the door.”
His work appeared in such publications as the Village Voice and The New York Times, and he contributed the introduction to a Library of America edition of Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden.” His own books included the essay collections “Walking the Dead Diamond River” and “Heart’s Desire,” the novels “Cat Man” and “The Peacock’s Tail” and the travel work “African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan.” Despite a stutter that left him terrified of social interactions, he taught at several schools and was on the faculty of Bennington College from 1963 to 2005.
He was married twice, including for 25 years to Commentary magazine editor Marion Nagid, with whom he had daughter Molly. The relationship ended in divorce; Hoagland confided his many infidelities in a highly personal 1995 Esquire essay, two years after Nagid’s death.
Hoagland nearly lost his job at Bennington in the early ’90s because of an Esquire article in which he cited the “icy promiscuity” of gays. After Bennington initially decided not to rehire him, he appealed the decision to a faculty personnel committee, which ruled in his favor.
In recent years, he lived with his partner Trudy Carter, a social worker who died in 2025.
‘Life after disappointment’
A New York City native who spent much of his childhood in New Canaan, Connecticut, he preferred nature and animal life to fellow humans and remembered hurrying from the school bus to the woods at the end of the day. Trips to the circus at Madison Square Garden so inspired him that he found a summer job at age 18 in the “Animal Department” of Ringling Bros.
He also enjoyed books and writing, a form of communication not inhibited by a stutter. At Harvard University, academic mentors included the poets Archibald MacLeish and John Berryman. and classmates included John Updike. He drew upon his time in the circus for his debut novel, “Cat Man,” which brought him a literary fellowship from publisher Houghton Mifflin and came out in 1956.
But the fiction that followed, “The Circle Home” and “The Peacock’s Tail,” failed to catch on and he would acknowledge he lacked the imaginative power to be a “glamorous poet or high-flying novelist.” Hoagland instead made the most of what he called the “accommodation to defeat” by turning to nonfiction and discovering there was “life after disappointment.”
“Essayists are foot soldiers, solo explorers blazing the trees as they go along, but they can gain height as though jumping on a trampoline and multiply themselves if they can clarify for other people what they, too, have been feeling,” he wrote in his memoir. “Essays are not panoramic like large-scope fiction, but seek analogies, as a short story does, a deft loop-around that lets you look perhaps at your own tracks.”