Edward Hoagland, nature and travel writer with a personal and poetic style, dies at 93

NEW YORK — Edward Hoagland, a prize-winning nature and travel writer who overcame badly impaired eyesight to explore the world and hone a conversational and digressive style that mirrored the spontaneous paths of his journeys, has died at age 93.

Hoagland's daughter, Molly Magid Hoagland, said that he died Feb. 17 at an assisted living facility in Manhattan. She did not give a cause of death.

With influences ranging from John Muir to Michel de Montaigne, Hoagland published dozens of books and magazine pieces and took in the most remote settings and extreme climates. Reading him was like being invited to come along. He might begin an essay with some thoughts on the personality of bears — ''their piggishness and sleepiness and unsociability with each other'' — move on to the daily routines of game wardens, detour through the history of animal tracking devices and come back around to bears' nesting habits.

''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,'' he wrote in ''Bears, Bears, Bears,'' one of his more popular pieces.

He hiked the southern edge of Yellowstone National Park, watched penguins fight for space near the Antarctic Peninsula and traced the evolution of hippies in the rural Vermont community where he spent half the year. His most acclaimed essay was likely ''The Courage of Turtles,'' in which he found in his subjects a multidimensional system of communications and rituals: ''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.

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 Magid, 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 Magid'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.

‘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.''