“America’s most intelligent and wide-ranging essayist-naturalist.”

– Philip Roth

“One of the very best writers of his generation.”

– Saul Bellow

“Edward Hoagland is a strong, solid writer with a splendid feel for the intricacy, queerness and stubborn pertinacity of life. He is also, so far as I know, the best essayist working in our perishing republic.”

– Edward Abbey

“Hoagland is our wild world’s literary virtuoso.”

– Annie Proulx

“The Thoreau of our time, an essayist so intensely personal, so sharp-eyed and deep-sighted, so tender and tough, lyrical and elegiac, as to transmute a simple stroll into a full-blown mystical experience.”

– Washington Post

“The best of Edward Hoagland is the best in the land.”

– Annie Dillard

“The best essayist of my generation.”

– John Updike

“Hoagland, one of the few American writers who has forged a brilliant career out of essays, is our Chopin of the genre.”

– Joyce Carol Oates

"One of the best celebrants of the natural world."

– The Atlantic

"Hoagland is surely one of our most truthful writers about nature . . ."

– The New York Times Book Review