Edward Hoagland, a master wordsmith and one of the country’s most esteemed nature and travel writers, died in New York City on Feb. 17 at the age of 93.
During his long career, Mr. Hoagland published 24 books and an untold number of essays and short stories, some of which were written on the Vineyard at his seasonal home in Edgartown, located just two blocks away from the Vineyard Gazette. Unlike most seasonal residents, Mr. Hoagland preferred winters on the Island to summers, chasing solitude rather than beach time. Come summer he headed to rural Vermont, to stay close to the subject he loved most of all: nature.
In his home on Winter street in Edgartown, among the book-filled shelves was a first edition of Walden by Henry David Thoreau. Inside the book was a personalized inscription to him from the writer John Updike: “For Ted Hoagland, our own Thoreau.”
He sold the home in 2019, moving off Island with his longtime partner Trudy Carter to live in an assisted care facility. Ms. Carter, who worked as a bereavement counselor for Hospice & Palliative Care of Martha’s Vineyard, died in November of 2025.
Ted Hoagland was born in 1932 in New York City but grew up in Connecticut, where he would wander the woods and meadows, streams and rivers, immersing himself at a young age with the subjects that would fuel his writing life.
“I love tugboats, I love turtles, I love mountain lions,” he said in a 2011 interview with the Gazette, upon the publication of his 21st book at the age of 78.
During that same interview he acknowledged his love of people too, while also noting the dual nature of humanity, especially when it comes to its often careless disdain for the natural world.
“I have a Whitman, Emersonian love of people. God is energy and the Big Bang is still in our smiles,” he said, then paused and continued, “and in our destructiveness too.”
Mr. Hoagland was educated at Harvard and wrote his first book, a novel, as an undergraduate. Later, in New York City, he turned to nonfiction writing for magazines, in particular the Village Voice, then in its infancy.
“I would publish [essays] in the Village Voice, which was only a few blocks from my apartment in New York, so I had the joy of turning in something on Monday and seeing people on the subway and Staten Island ferry reading it on Wednesday. The rewards were immediate in terms not just of ego but in terms of communicating, which is why people write,” he recalled during a 2012 interview with the Gazette.
“I rode tugboats around New York harbor for them and covered a Gambino Mafia trial, wrote about love and pain and dogs and turtles, and a lunchroom in the meatpacking district where I lived, where a naked girl in high heels paraded down the counter above you as you slathered ketchup on your cheeseburger,” he continued.
Mr. Hoagland spent his whole life battling a pronounced stutter, which made speaking difficult. But he acknowledged it served him well as a journalist, forcing him to listen as well as forming his view of the world as an investigative outsider, never fully comfortable with his oral presentation.
“I used my stutter as best I could. I used it to learn how to interview people,” he said.
An old girlfriend once described him as “the man with a thousand questions,” he recalled.
Although speaking never stopped being something of a chore, on the page he could make words do whatever he wanted. Old school but not old fashioned, he wrote on a 1968 Olympia typewriter, classical music playing in the background. His output was slow, often just 20 words an hour he once said, but constant.
Eventually, after some persuasion, he began writing short essays for the Gazette, walking them to the newsroom to hand in his freshly typed pages.
In a 2016 essay for the Gazette, he wrote about his stutter, and his blindness, which also affected him for various periods of his life.
“To live is to see, I always believed, along the waterfronts of Manhattan, Mumbai and Mombasa, gorges in the Himalayas and Alpes, Maritimes, Alaska, Uganda,” he wrote. “What could be better? I stuttered badly for more than 50 years so I couldn’t ask for directions. My eyes were my joy but also my salvation, figuring out directions, not to mention faces, because a stutterer must spot the bullies before they home in on him….The subtleties of a sunrise or even a menu can’t be scanned any more. Nor a friend’s face for distress — you’ll need to reach out and feel their cheek for tears. Music becomes the bread of life.”
In another essay for the Gazette he tackled the past and what he missed about the old days. But, like everything he wrote, he approached this from a place of joy, as well as sorrow, for the things he missed.
“I once drove across the country in a Model A Ford manufactured some while before Pearl Harbor. So yes, my shelf life has almost expired. But I miss elm trees, box turtles, Joe DiMaggio and other commonplaces. Not Franco Spain, but greasy spoons. Not beanballs but Boston’s Splendid Splinter."
Through it all, from covering famines in Africa to hardscrabble lives in Alaska to circus life (as a young man he worked as the big cat caretaker for a traveling circus), he was guided by one major principle.
“You work best and function best in our lives if we are operating from love,” he said. “It’s not something you consciously flick on like an electric switch, but I’ve written about what I love and of course that’s also helped to raise a family or have a circle of friendships. So love is a secret of life.”
This article appears in February 27, 2026.
Memories of Ted wearing that green hat warm my heart. Working with Trudy at hospice was a gift.
Beautiful tribute, Bill.
Gorgeous.
Thank you!
Thanks so much for this Bill. You pass folks on the street and then, one day they disappear. Now I know where Ed went. This wonderful piece explains so much. We never really introduced ourselves but I believe we shared a mutual, unspoken affinity as we passed by each other. Now I see why. I’ll have to reconnect albeit through Ed’s writing. Thanks again.
As a lifelong reader and admirer of Mr. Hoagland, I appreciate this tribute. The final quote in your piece could have come from an enlightened spiritual teacher. Hoagland might not have liked such a comparison, but his deep appreciation of the natural and human worlds alone qualify him as one for his readers. Thank you.
Lovely. Thank you.
Lovely written piece, about a lovely writer
I only just learned that Ted Hoagland was gone, and that Trudy had proceeded him in November. I worked on MV for years before retiring in 2015, and was proud to even think of him as a friend. A pre-eminent and unflinchingly honest writer, and a good guy.
Ted was part of our poetry group. He was a very intelligent and humorous gentleman whom we had the great honor to know.
I visited Ted at his house in Vermont around the time he turned 80. He told me he was having three books published within a year of his 80th birthday — the most prolific he had ever been.
His house, as I recall, did not have electricity, and he worked with the sun and stopped at dark. Because of his poor eyesight, and to prevent having to sort writings by sight, he had three typewriters set up around the room one facing each of three walls, so he could go back to whatever project he wanted to work on simply by location.
His house was the next-to-last up a mountain road, and riding into town as a passenger with him, with his limited eyesight, was one of the more exciting car rides I’ve had in my life.
The last paragraph of this piece, with its beautiful quote from Ted, captures in a nutshell the appeal of all of his writings, as different and far-flung as they can be, one from another: they share that attitude of caring and love, and they help the reader make friends with the world — an enormous gift he gave us.