Edward Morley Hoagland (December 21, 1932 – February 17, 2026) was an American author best known for his nature and travel writing.
Edward Morley Hoagland was born in New York City on December 21, 1932. He attended Deerfield Academy and matriculated at Harvard University. He joined the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the summers of 1951 and 1952. He helped tend the big cats and sold a novel about the experience, Cat Man (1955), before graduating from Harvard in 1954. After serving two years in the Army, he published The Circle Home (1960), a novel about boxing, before going on the first of nine trips to Alaska and British Columbia.
During the 1970s, he made the first two of his five trips to Africa. After receiving two Guggenheim Fellowships, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982. He taught at The New School, Rutgers, Sarah Lawrence, CUNY, the University of Iowa, U.C. Davis, Columbia University, Beloit College, and Brown University. In 2005, Hoagland retired from a teaching position at Bennington College. Starting in 1968, he focused mostly on Montaigne-type essays.
According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Hoagland's love of solitude and silent observation of wildlife rather than social conversation may have resulted from a severe stammer that still persists. This stammer has, according to Hoagland himself, influenced how he writes: "Words are spoken at considerable cost to me, so a great value is placed on each one. That has had some effect on me as a writer. As a child, since I couldn't talk to people, I became close to animals. I became an observer, and in all my books, even the novels, witnessing things is what counts." His reluctance to speak may account for his desire to write—and be read—and for the sensitive visual, tactile, and olfactory images in his writings.
After retiring, Hoagland spent summers in Barton, Vermont, at a place he had owned since 1969, and winters in Martha's Vineyard. He died in Manhattan on February 17, 2026, aged 93.
Hoagland's nonfiction was praised by writers and critics such as John Updike, who called him "the best essayist of my generation"; Philip Roth, who called him "America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist"; and Alfred Kazin, who said he "writes for magazines on all manner of topics with regular, predictable brilliance".
Cat Man, Houghton Mifflin, 1956; NAL, 1958; Ballantine, 1973; Arbor House, 1984; Lyons Press, 2003
The Circle Home, Thomas Y. Crowell, 1960; Avon, 1977; Lyons Press, 2003
The Peacock's Tail, McGraw-Hill, 1965
Notes from the Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia, Random House, 1969; Ballantine, 1972; North Point Press, 1982; Sierra Club Books, 1995; Modern Library, 2002
The Courage of Turtles, Random House, 1971; Warner, 1974; North Point Press, 1985; Lyons & Burford, 1993
Walking the Dead Diamond River, Random House, 1973; Warner, 1974; North Point Press, 1985; Lyons & Burford, 1993
The Moose on the Wall, Barrie & Jenkins, 1974
Red Wolves and Black Bears, Random House, 1976; Penguin, 1983; Lyons & Burford, 1995
African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan, Random House, 1979; Penguin, 1981; Lyons & Burford, 1995
The Edward Hoagland Reader, Random House, 1979; Vintage, 1981
The Tugman's Passage, Random House, 1982; Penguin, 1983; Lyons & Burford, 1995
Seven Rivers West, Simon & Schuster, 1986; Penguin, 1987; Lyons Press, 2003