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Ivan Doig (; June 27, 1939 – April 9, 2015) was an American author and novelist, widely known for his sixteen fiction and non-fiction books set mostly in his native Montana, celebrating the landscape and people of the post-war American West.
With settings ranging from the Rocky Mountain Front to Alaska's coast, Puget Sound and Oregon, the Chicago Tribune noted in 1987 that Doig wrote of "immigrant families, dedicated schoolteachers, miners, fur trappers, town builders" and of "the uncertainties of friendship and love, and colossal battles of will, set amid the vast unpredictabilities of a land noted for sudden deadly floods, agonizing droughts, blizzards and forest fires." Doig himself would later say "I come from the lariat proletariat, the working-class point of view." In particular, Doig "believed that ordinary people deserve to have their stories told"
/ref> , Doig's 1977 memoir, was finalist for the National Book Award for Contemporary Thought. In 2007 Doig won the University of Colorado's Center of the American West's Wallace Stegner Award. Doig's 2006 novel The Whistling Season became a New York Times best-seller. He won the Western Literature Association's lifetime Distinguished Achievement award and held the distinction of the only living author with works of both fiction and non-fiction listed in the top 12 of the San Francisco Chronicle poll of best books of the 20th century. Doig's life and his works are the focus of the documentary film by Montana PBS and 4:08 productions, Ivan Doig: Landscapes of a Western Mind.
In 2006, Sven Birkerts described Doig as "a presiding figure in the literature of the American West."
Doig graduated salutatorian in a class of 21 students from Valier High School in Valier, Montana. He won a full-tuition scholarship to Northwestern University, where he earned a bachelor's degree in 1961 and a master'
/ref> His master's thesis was on the subject of televised congressional hearings on organized crime. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation on John J. McGilvra (1827–1903).
Important first-hand influences on his writing included his high school English and Latin teacher, Frances Tidyman; Sam Jamison, who taught him reporting at Northwestern; and Ben Baldwin, who taught him broadcast news.
After he earned his degree in 1962, Doig was drafted into the Air Force Reserve. He was released from active duty in 1963. Doig lived with his wife Carol Doig, née Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington until his death from multiple myeloma in 2015. "Acclaimed Montana author Ivan Doig dies at 75," The Billings Gazette, April 9, 2015.
He was related to Fully Informed Jury Association co-founder, Don Doig.Montana FIJA Events, * Montana FIJAFest, August 21-23 (Thursday-Saturday), 2014.
The western landscape and people play an important role in Doig's fiction, with much of it set in the Montana country of his youth. His major theme is family life in the past, mixing personal memory and regional history. The first three Montana novels— English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana—form the "McCaskill trilogy", covering the first century of Montana statehood from 1889 to 1989.
/ref> and was a longtime professor of journalism.
/ref> He died from multiple myeloma on April 9, 2015.
The Ivan Doig digital collection consists of manuscripts, proofs and galleys, typed and handwritten writing fragments, pocket notebooks, note cards, diaries, journals, photographs, audio/visual material, and memorabilia created or collected by Ivan Doig. The physical collection is preserved within Montana State University Library's Merrill G. Burlingame Special Collections. The digital collection is available online. Ivan Doig Archive, Montana State University Library
This library includes a collaboration with Acoustic Atlas, Soundscapes of Ivan Doig, with recordings and interviews from the lands and peoples featured in his novels.
target="_blank" rel="nofollow"> Ivandoig.com web archive at Archive-It
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