Edward Hoagland

Edward Morley Hoagland (December 21, 1932 – February 17, 2026) was an American novelist, short story writer, journalist, college teacher, editor, book reviewer, and author of nonfiction essays and books on nature and travel. In 1982 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Quotes

• I used to catch possums and black snakes as well as turtles, and I kept dogs and goats. Some summers I worked in a menagerie with the big personalities of the animal kingdom, like elephants and rhinoceroses. I was twenty before these enthusiasms began to wane, and it was then that I picked turtles as the particular animal I wanted to keep in touch with. I was allergic to fur, for one thing, and turtles need minimal care and not much in the way of quarters. They’re personable beasts. They see the same colors we do and they seem to see just as well, as one discovers in trying to sneak up on them. In the laboratory they unravel the twists of a maze with the hot-blooded rapidity of a mammal. Though they can’t run as fast as a rat, they improve on their errors just as quickly, pausing at each crossroads to look left and right.
  • "The Courage of Turtles". Hoagland on Nature: Essays. Simon and Schuster. 2005. pp. 3–10. ISBN 9780762774654.  (512 pages; quote from pp. 4–5; The essay The Courage of Turtles was first published in December 1968 in The Village Voice and was published in 1970 by Random House in a book of the same name.)

• I lost my sight once before, to cataracts, a quarter-century ago, but it was restored miraculously by surgery. It then went seriously bad again, until, reaching 80, I needed a cane. Tap, tap. Ambulatory vision is the technical term.
  Everything becomes impromptu, hour by hour improvised. Pouring coffee so it doesn’t spill, feeling for the john so you won’t pee on the floor, calling information for a phone number because you can’t read the computer, or the book. Eating takes considerable time since you can’t see your food. Feeling for the scrambled eggs with your fingers, you fret about whether you appear disgusting. Shopping for necessities requires help. So does traveling on a bus.
  The kindness of strangers is proverbial — a woman leads me through the bustle of an airport toward the taxi stand, a waitress hands me back a $50 bill I mistook for a 20. Blindness is factually a handicap, yet an empathetic one, because other people can so easily imagine themselves suffering from it, sometimes even experiencing a rehearsal for it when stumbling through a darkened house at night. I remember how in school we teased students with Coke-bottle glasses, but didn’t laugh at blind folk whose black glasses signified that they couldn’t see at all.
  • (November 17, 2016) "Feeling My Way Into Blindness". The New York Times.

Quotes about Edward Hoagland

• He found his literary métier with his first nonfiction book, “Notes From the Century Before” (1969). A single long narrative of a trek through British Columbia, with its people and places indelibly portrayed, it drew rapturous critical praise.
  Throughout Mr. Hoagland’s nonfiction was woven a ruminative thread of memoir: the pain of isolation born of his stutter (“vocal handcuffs,” he called the condition); his difficulties with women (his first marriage, to Amy Ferrara, ended in divorce, as did his second, to Marion Magid, a longtime editor at Commentary magazine); the contents, and discontents, of his sex life; his bouts of suicidal thoughts; and his two bouts with blindness.
  In his 50s, Mr. Hoagland began to lose his eyesight to cataracts and damaged retinas. For three years he was legally blind, a particular grief for someone who a decade earlier had written, “To live is to see.”
  An innovative operation, involving the insertion of plastic implants into his eyes, reversed his condition, although his doctors told him that his newfound sight would not last.
  There followed, in the 1990s, years of tireless travel and ravenous seeing — taking in what he could, while he could, he wrote, “like a prisoner sprung from a dungeon.”
  • Margalit Fox, with contributed reporting by Ash Wu, (February 23, 2026) "Edward Hoagland, Literary Explorer of Nature and Himself, Dies at 93. In his lyrical writings, he examined physical landscapes as well as the interior terrain of his own life — up to the blindness that overtook him in his later years". The New York Times.

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Edward Hoagland on Wikipedia