Born in New York City on December 21, 1932, Edward Hoagland sold his first novel Cat Man before he graduated from Harvard in 1954. He was in the U.S. Army from 1955 to 1957. His many collections of essays include The Courage of Turtles, Walking the Dead Diamond River, Red Wolves and Black Bears, The Tugman's Passage, Heart's Desire and Balancing Acts. Elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1982, Hoagland has long been a member of the elite coterie that writes for The New Yorker, Atlantic and the New York Times Book Review. John Updike once referred to him as "the best essayist of my generation." Hoagland taught at various universities before retiring in 2005.

His travel journal about visiting British Columbia for the first time in 1966, Notes from a Century Before, published in 1969, was followed by another memoir called African Calliope: A Journey to the Sudan. Notes from the Century Before recalls Hoagland's three-month excursion 'into the wild country of British Columbia,' focusing on characters he met while reaching Telegraph Creek via the Stikine River. "It was an exuberant, staccato summer," he wrote. "Luck and events and kindnesses melded with one another. I rushed along eagerly, without any special introspection, just putting down what I found out." While living at Hazelton, Hoagland essentially went prospecting for stories, interviewing settlers and gleaning nuggets from written sources. Loggers, ranchers and miners were exotic creatures to someone from New York City and Harvard. His transient's memoir is one of dozens written by brief visitors to the "untamed" and "unspoiled" wilds of British Columbia since Confederation, but invariably such journalistic exercises are considered unique by their publishers. Hoagland's second visit to British Columbia in 1968 served as the grist for his fourth novel, Seven Rivers West, published in 1986. The journal that Hoagland kept during that second visit was published as Early in the Season, edited by Stephen Hume, with an epilogue added by Hoagland.

Edward Morley Hoagland lives in Bennington, Vermont.

Reviews of the author's work by BC Studies:
Early in the Season: A British Columbia Journal

BOOKS:

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; Pussy and Dick , 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
City Tales, Capra Press, 1986
Seven Rivers West, Simon & Schuster, 1986; Penguin, 1987; Lyons Press, 2003
Heart's Desire, Simon & Schuster, 1988; Collins Harville, 1990; Touchstone, 1991
The Final Fate of the Alligators, Capra Press, 1992
Balancing Acts, Simon & Schuster, 1992, Touchstone, 1993; Lyons Press, 1999
Tigers & Ice, Lyons Press, 1999
Compass Points, Pantheon, 2001; Vintage, 2002
Hoagland on Nature, Lyons Press, 2003
Early in the Season: A British Columbia Journal, Douglas & McIntyre, 2008. Edited by Stephen Hume. $24.95 978-1-55365-428-5

[BCBW 2008] "Transient"