Edward Hoagland

From Philosopedia

May 2006, American Academy of Arts and Letters Ceremonial

Hoagland, Edward (Morley) (1932— )

A teacher of literature who retired in 2005 from Bennington College in Vermont, Hoagland is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1992, responding to a query by Warren Allen Smith concerning humanism, wrote:

• I’m a pantheist but of course include humankind in the family of nature, for better or worse. Am particularly relieved at the ending of the Cold War because in foreseeable wars we will only be killing ourselves, not that whole wider world.

Hoagland has studied with Thornton Wilder,John Ciardi, Alfred Kazin, John Berryman, and Archibald MacLeish. He is author of

Cat Man (1954)

Notes from the Century Before (1969)

The Courage of Turtles (1971)

Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973)

The Moose on the Wall (1974)

Red Wolves and Black Bears (1976)

African Caliope (1979)

The Edward Hoagland Reader (1979)

The Tugman's Passage (1982)

The Courage of Turtles: 15 Essays About Compassion, Pain and Love, About Being at Home, About Rodeos, the Circus, and Boxing, About Being a Wasp (1985)

City Tales (1986)

Heart's Desire (1988)

Balancing Acts (1992)

The Shameless Diary of an Explorer: A Story of Failure on Mt. McKinley (2001, with Robert Dunn

Compass Points: How I Live (2002)

Notes from The Century Before: A Journal from British Columbia with David Quammen and Jon Krakauer (2002)

Hoagland on Nature: Essays (2003)

Shooting Blind: Photographs by the Visually Impaired (Contributor, 2005)

Sex and the River Styx (Chelsea Green, 2011)

In a New York Times Magazine article (27 November 1994), Hoagland wrote,

• Reincarnation or a heavenly life is the ultimate comfort offered by every religion I am familiar with, and I don’t want to be me for more than another 20 years anyway. Neither eternal oblivion nor me, but something else. Maybe moss. One could do worse. Moss, if left alone, seems to live about as long as people do; then it goes back to mulligatawny soup again.

(Phillip Lopate, reviewing Sex and the River Styx, commences,

There is probably no essayist today who has earned more respect from his peers and fellow practitioners than Edward Hoagland. John Updike called him “the best essayist of my generation,” Philip Roth said he was “America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist,” and Joyce Carol Oates described him evocatively as “our Chopin of the genre.” It may have cost these famous novelists little to crown him king of what they may think a lesser genre; but he has also been a model for younger environmental writers, such as Gretel Ehrlich, Bill McKibben, and Scott Russell Sanders.

{WAS, 30 June 1992; 17 May 2006}