Idaho Commission for Libraries

Information on Ivan Doig

Ivan Doig was born on June 27, 1938 in White Sulphur Springs, Montana. He was the son of Charles Campbell and Berneta (Ringer) Doig. On April 17, 1965, Ivan Doig married Carol Muller. Doig now lives in Seattle, Washington. Doig has integrated his knowledge of this area of the United States into a number of well-known books, including the memoir This House of Sky; Landscapes of a Western Mind, Winter Brothers: A Season on the Edge of America, and the 1996 novel Bucking the Sun, Heart Earth, English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride With Me, Mariah Montana comprise Doig’s fictional trilogy, also taking place in the Northwest United States.

Internal conflict among members of the McCaskill family and the coming-of-age of its younger son in 1939 form the basis for the novel English Creek, the first part of Doig’s "McCaskill Family" trilogy. English Creek is anchored in the American West and resembles a 19th Century European novel. In the novel, Doig struggles with issue of character and morality.

"I am Montana-born and now live within half a mile of Puget Sound," Doig once told Contemporary Authors. "Inevitably or so it seems to me, my books are the result of those popular pulls of the Rocky Mountains and the Pacific. Whichever the setting, in both my fiction and nonfiction I try to work two stubborn substances, research and craft, into becoming the hardest alloy of all– a good story. And that to me is the ultimate ‘region,’ the true home, for a writer. Specific geographies, but galaxies of imaginative expression–we’ve seen them both exist in William Faulkner’s postage-stamp size Yoknapatawpha County, and in Gabreil Garcia-Marquez’ nowhere village of Macondo dreaming in its hundred years of solitude. It is my utter belief that writers of caliber can ground their work in specific land and lingo and yet be writing of that larger country: life."

Excerpts from Contemporary Authors. Gale Research 1999.

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