Edward Hoagland, "whose shimmering essays explored the wonders of the natural world, the sights of faraway places, and his own journeys into blindness," died February 17, the New York Times reported. He was 93. John Updike called him "the best essayist of my generation," and Philip Roth praised him as "America's most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist."
His essay collections, including Walking the Dead Diamond River (1973), The Courage of Turtles (1970), Red Wolves and Black Bears (1976), and The Tugman's Passage (1982), gathered works first published in the Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, and elsewhere. Other books include Balancing Acts (1992); The Final Fate of the Alligators (1992); African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan (1979); Seven Rivers West (1986), Children Are Diamonds: An African Apocalypse (2013), and In the Country of the Blind (2016).
Hoagland divided his time for many years between New York City and Vermont, writing about both city and rural life. In his essay "In the Country of the Blind," which was included in Compass Points (2001), he wrote: "I loved the city like the country--the hydrants that fountained during the summer like a splashing brook--and wanted therefore to absorb the cruel along with the good."
From childhood, the Times wrote, Hoagland had a severe stutter, and found comfort in books as well as solitary walks in the Connecticut countryside. He determined early on to be a writer, a life that would afford him a fluent means of communication, but the career plan did not sit well with his parents.
"I tended to downplay my various excitements in the house lest they be restricted or used against me," he wrote in "Small Silences," included in Sex and the River Styx (2011). "It was not a silly instinct because my parents did soon tell me I was reading too much, and by prep school were telling my favorite teachers that I was too intrigued by nature and writing; that these were dodges due to my handicap and might derail a more respectable career in law or medicine."
At Harvard, he studied writing with poet Archibald MacLeish, who became his mentor. While still an undergraduate, Hoagland won the Houghton Mifflin Literary Fellowship, which included publication of Cat Man (1956), his first novel, followed by The Circle Home (1960) and The Peacock's Tail (1965).
His first nonfiction book was 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," the Times noted.
In his 50s, Hoagland began to lose his eyesight and for three years was legally blind before an innovative operation restored his sight, though not permanently. The books he wrote in the 1990s were considered some of his finest, among them Tigers & Ice: Reflections on Nature and Life (1999) and Compass Points (2002).
In a 1994 Times essay, Hoagland wrote of family and friends who had died: "I don't expect to rejoin or 'miss' these people in the hereafter, yet, having spent a great deal of my personal and professional life riding a surf of wind-song, wolf howls, elephants snuffling, trees soughing, grasshoppers buzzing, frogs croaking, I do think I'll mix in somehow with all of the above, the wine of human nature blending with the milk of outdoor nature in a mulligatawny soup of soil, rainwater and pondy chemicals, with infinite possibilities once again."