Doig, Ivan 1939–

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Doig, Ivan 1939–

PERSONAL: Born June 27, 1939, in White Sulphur Springs, MT; son of Charles Campbell (a ranch worker) and Berneta Doig; married Carol Dean Muller (a professor), April 17, 1965. Education: Northwestern University, B.J., 1961, M.S., 1962; University of Washington, Seattle, Ph.D., 1969. Hobbies and other interests: Reading, hiking.

CAREER: Novelist and journalist. Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers, Decatur, IL, editorial writer, 1963–64; Rotarian, Evanston, IL, assistant editor, 1964–66; freelance journalist and novelist, 1969–. Military service: U.S. Air Force Reserve, 1962–68; became sergeant.

MEMBER: Authors Guild, Authors League of America, PEN.

AWARDS, HONORS: National Book Award nomination and Christopher Award, both 1979, both for This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind; Pacific Northwest Booksellers Award for Literary Excellence, 1979, 1981, 1983, 1985, 1988, and 1994; Governor's Writers Day awards, 1979, 1981, 1985, 1988; D.Litt., Montana State University, 1984, and Lewis and Clark College, 1987; National Endowment for the Arts fellowship, 1985; Western Heritage Award for best western novel, 1985, for English Creek; Distinguished Achievement Award, Western Literature Association, 1989; Evans Biography Award, 1993, for Heart Earth; Pacific Northwest Writers Association Achievement Award, 2002.

WRITINGS:

NONFICTION

(With wife, Carol M. Doig) News: A Consumer's Guide, Prentice-Hall (Englewood Cliffs, NJ), 1972.

The Streets We Have Come Down (textbook), Hayden (Rochelle Park, NJ), 1975.

(Editor) Utopian America: Dreams and Realities, Hayden (Rochelle Park, NJ), 1976.

Early Forestry Research: A History of the Pacific Northwest Forest & Range Experiment Station, 1925–1975, U.S. Forestry Service (Washington, DC), 1976.

This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind (memoir), Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1978.

Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1980.

(With Duncan Kelso) Inside This House of Sky, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1983.

Heart Earth (memoir), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1993.

NOVELS

The Sea Runners, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1982, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2006.

English Creek (first novel in trilogy), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1984.

Dancing at the Rascal Fair (second novel in trilogy), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1987.

Ride with Me, Mariah Montana (final novel in trilogy), Atheneum (New York, NY), 1990.

Bucking the Sun, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1996.

Mountain Time, Scribner (New York, NY), 1999.

Prairie Nocturne, Scribner (New York, NY), 2003.

The Whistling Season, Harcourt (Orlando, FL), 2006.

Contributor to periodicals, including Modern Maturity, New York Times, Los Angeles Times Book Review, and Writer's Digest.

SIDELIGHTS: Ivan Doig has integrated his knowledge and love of the Pacific Northwest 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 at the Edge of America, and the 1996 novel Bucking the Sun. In addition, Doig's English Creek, Dancing at the Rascal Fair, and Ride with Me, Mariah Montana comprise a trilogy of novels that also take place in the Northwest United States.

This House of Sky is a memoir that describes the harsh but rewarding life of the author's forebears, settlers in the mining towns of western Montana. Remarking that the memoir format in general "is notorious for snaring even gifted writers in thickets of anecdotage and sentiment," Time reviewer Frank Trippet found that Doig "avoids such traps. Exercising a talent at once robust and sensitive, he redeems the promise of [his] first fetching sentences." The author, Trippet concluded, "lifts what might have been marginally engaging reminiscence into an engrossing and moving recovery of an obscure human struggle. There is defeat and triumph here, grief and joy, nobility and meanness, all arising from commonplace events, episodes and locales."

Carl Bredahl, writing in World and I, commented that "recent scholarship … rejects monomyth" as presented in much Western genre fiction. According to the critic, "the clean westerns of Zane Grey, Owen Western, or Louis L'Amour … are of narrowly limited interest to anyone attracted to the diversity of western/American experience. Western writing is no longer only the province of names like Willa Cather and Walter Van Tilburg Clark." Bredahl included Doig among such contemporary Western chroniclers, which "includes such native Americans as Wendy Rose, Scott Momaday, Leslie Silko, and Louise Erdrich, and Chicano writers including Rudolfo Anaya, Jose Villarreal, and Raymond Barrio." Each writer brings to the literary table a distinct "tribal culture" or other "contextual experience" of the region.

Doig returns to the world of his forebears with Heart Earth, a memoir inspired by a collection of his mother's letters that serves as a "masterful companion to This House of Sky," according to John Marshall of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Brad Knickerbocker of the Christian Science Monitor also had high praise for Doig's memoir, noting that though the book closes with the death of Berneta Doig when the author was age six, the "poignancy and sadness are not overwhelming, and one is left remembering the humor and family closeness … the strength of character and essential hopefulness that have come to be Doig trademarks." Michael Dorris, writing in the Los Angeles Times, praised Doig's lyricism, particularly in his descriptions of his native Montana, but noted also that in the end Heart Earth is "a love story, the gift of a child to a parent who wouldn't stay forgotten."

Winter Brothers is a nonfiction work with an unusual premise: Doig recreates the journey of nineteenth-century traveler James Gilchrist Swan, who left his wife and children in antebellum Boston to explore the Pacific Northwest. Doig, who studied Swan's extensive diaries, intersperses passages of Swan's own writing with his own comments on a trip Doig took with his wife. "Sometimes the exercise is forced; sometimes it pushes [the author] into overwriting," maintained Raymond A. Sokolov in the New York Times Book Review. "But the occasional patches of dullness or lushness should deter no one from devouring this gorgeous tribute to a man and a region unjustly neglected heretofore. The reader has the pleasure of encountering two contrasting styles and two angles of view, both infused with the fresh air and spirit of the Northwest."

In Bucking the Sun Doig mixes fact and fiction as he chronicles the construction of the Fort Peck Dam, an enormous earthmoving project begun under the auspices of Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal to benefit the economy of northern Montana during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Fort Peck became the largest earth-fill dam in the world upon its completion, and the process of its construction—an "absolutely stunning premise for a novel," according to Washington Post Book World reviewer David Laskin—is recounted by Doig through its effect upon an independent-minded clan of recent Scots immigrants. The Duffs first attempted to make a living as farmers, but when the dam project put their acreage under water, family members were compelled to join the 10,000-member construction crew. Causing a rift in the family is the fact that Hugh Duff's son, Owen, who left home to get a college degree, has returned as one of the leading engineers on the project while his father serves on a work crew under him. Calling Bucking the Sun "a tour de force of historical fiction," Laskin added that the novel "is one of those books that takes you over as you read it, invading your daydreams…. Doig writes with absolute, perfect-pitch authority on dams, Duffs, the Depression, and the feel of life under Montana's fabled sky." While Los Angeles Times Book Review contributor Judith Freeman criticized the novel for not including "a glimpse of the soul, no matter how tormented or sane," Timothy Foote countered in the New York Times Book Review that Doig "artfully seasons the history lesson by serving it up with an intricate case of murder" that "helps with the occasional case of longueurs of what is otherwise a wide-screen, Depression-era narrative" largely devoted to dam building.

Internal conflict among members of a close-knit family and the coming of age of its younger son in 1939 form the basis for Doig's novel English Creek, the first part of the "McCaskill Family" series and a book that "achieves a flawless weld of fact and fiction," according to Carol Van Strum in USA Today. As in his previous nonfiction, Doig describes the Pacific region of years past, evoking, according to Van Strum, "the sturdy, generous spirit of an era when survival—of child and adult—demanded quick wits, hard work and humor enough to fuel both." English Creek "is old-fashioned in the best sense of the word," noted Christian Science Monitor critic James Kaufmann, adding that while "Doig is concerned with telling a story that entertains,… he is also concerned with the novel's moral and ethical implications."

To Newsday reviewer Wendy Smith, English Creek "is neither nostalgic nor simple: It's too concrete and detailed in its evocation of the past, too tough-minded in its evaluation of human behavior for that. There are no truly evil characters, but there are weak ones, and Doig makes it clear that the West is cruel to those who can't stand up to its demands." Noting that the novel is "firmly anchored in the American West," Smith added that English Creek "nonetheless resembles a nineteenth-century European novel in its leisurely pace, measured tone and focus on understanding rather than action. In supple, muscular prose as terse and yet redolent with meaning as the speech of Montana, [Doig] … grapples with universal issues of character and morality."

The second installment in the "McCaskill Family" saga, Dancing at the Rascal Fair takes place a generation earlier than English Creek and features two Scots, Rob Barclay and Angus McCaskill, who homestead in Montana. Richard Critchfield, in the Washington Post Book World, praised Doig's ability to interweave history and fiction, and also commended his creation of dialogue, noting that the novel's characters "come alive when they talk," whether they are nineteenth-century Scots speaking English with Biblical cadences or contemporary rural Americans.

In Ride with Me, Mariah Montana Jick McCaskill, the adolescent protagonist of English Creek, is now a crusty, retired rancher who narrates the goings-on as he squires his daughter Mariah and Mariah's ex-husband around Montana to report on the state of the state for the Missoula Montanian. "Feeling the reins of present and future slip from his hands," wrote Susan Dodd in the Washington Post Book World, "Jick has grown a little irritable." It is Jick's voice, Dodd suggested, "cranky, confused, honest, stubborn and lovelorn," that "orchestrates the journey" and "makes the whole novel sing." Even so, wrote Burr Snider in the San Francisco Examiner, "the real star of this book is Montana," and Doig "takes you right into its big troubled heart."

Doig's Mountain Time is set in Seattle at the end of the twentieth century. The story revolves around Mitch Rozier, a divorced Montana native in his fifties who works as an environmental news columnist. His love interest is divorcee Lexa McCaskill, also from Montana, who caters parties for Seattle's software giants. Mitch is summoned by his sick father to return home to Montana where tensions between the two—as well as between Lexa and her sister Mariah—come to a head. Critics were largely positive in their assessment of the novel. Though Charlotte L. Glover in Library Journal found Mountain Time not Doig's best, she nonetheless concluded that it is "essential reading for fans of his 'Two Medicine' trilogy." A Publishers Weekly critic cited among the novel's "considerable strengths" the author's "lyrical writing about scenery" and his immersion in local history. "But most importantly," the critic added, "this is an honest and resonant portrait of idealists facing middle age and learning to deal with past issues that shadow their lives." Bill Ott in Booklist commented: "Doig lets his penchant for poetic prose get the best of him on occasion, but fortunately, the grittiness of his characters more than offsets the florid authorial voice. A worthy addition to Doig's impressive saga of the twentieth-century West."

In Prairie Nocturne Doig rejoins several characters from Dancing at the Rascal Fair. Susan Duff, a schoolgirl in the first novel, is now in her forties and contentedly living alone in Helena and giving voice lessons since her affair with gubernatorial candidate Wes Williamson. Williamson brings his black chauffeur, Monty Rathbun, to Susan for voice training. Her willingness to take on a black student in the racially charged early twentieth century prompts the Ku Klux Klan to vandalize the Duff homestead. Monty flees to Harlem, New York, where he becomes an overnight success, singing spirituals on the concert stage, and he is followed by Susan and Wes. Bill Ott in Booklist commented that the novel contains "a vast amount of fascinating historical material" but added: "The heart of the matter … is the three-sided relationship among Susan, Wes, and Monty;… Doig tightens the reins on his sometimes mannered prose and constructs a subtle, highly textured love story, nicely balancing period detail and well-modulated emotion." A Kirkus Reviews contributor wrote that Doig's "marvelously idiosyncratic sentences have the bite of mountain air and the springy rhythms of mountain folks' speech, but they're also more disciplined and less gnarled than in some past work." Seattle Times contributor Tim McNulty added that in Prairie Nocturne Doig "moves well beyond the romanticism of prairie homesteading and takes a level-eyed look at its costs. His characters … are saddled with the … brutality of their parents' lives." McNulty added, "All these events dramatize the tide of racism, genocide and conquest that accompanied European settlement of the West. This dark side of our history … haunts the lives of these characters." Speaking with Christy Karras for the Salt Lake Tribune, Doig commented on the rise of the Ku Klux Klan following World War I and noted that the organization was fueled by "new resentments. It's not just black and white resentment—it's anti-Catholic, anti-immigration, anti-Jewish and, to an extent, anti-urban. The U.S. was losing its rural roots." This frustration is the heart of Prairie Nocturne, the author explained.

The Whistling Season continues Doig's saga of Montana history. In the late 1950s, Paul Milliron, the school superintendent, has been told to close the state's remaining one-room schools. The decision causes Paul to reflect on his childhood in one of those schools, in the pivotal year of 1910, when his mother died and a housekeeper came to live with the family. The housekeeper, an unconventional and demanding widow from Minnesota, and her brother, who soon becomes the new schoolteacher, change thirteen-year-old Paul's life in ways he had not anticipated as the family struggles to eke out a living as dryland farmers. Signifying the importance of this time is the appearance of Haley's Comet, which the schoolchildren greet with a chorus of harmonicas. Though a writer for Kirkus Reviews declared that the novel was full of "homespun charm" but lacked a satisfying ending, in Booklist Bill Ott wrote that Doig "digs the details of his historical moments from the dirt in which they thrived" and concluded that the novel is the author's best since English Creek.

"I am Montana-born and now live within half a mile of Puget Sound," Doig once told CA. "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 Gabriel García-Márquez' 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."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Bredahl, A. Carl, New Ground: Western American Narrative and the Literary Canon, University of North Carolina Press (Chapel Hill, NC), 1989.

Doig, Ivan, This House of Sky: Landscapes of a Western Mind, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1978.

Doig, Ivan, Heart Earth, Atheneum (New York, NY), 1993.

Martin, Russell, Writers of the Purple Sage, Viking (New York, NY), 1984.

Meldrum, Barbara Howard, editor, Old West-New West: Centennial Essays. University of Idaho Press (Moscow, ID), 1993.

Morris, Gregory L., Talking Up a Storm: Voices of the New West, University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, NE), 1994.

O'Connell, Nicholas, At the Field's End: Interviews with Twenty Pacific Northwest Writers, Madrona Press (Austin, TX), 1987.

Simpson, Elizabeth, Earthlight, Wordfire: The Work of Ivan Doig, University of Idaho Press (Moscow, ID), 1992.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, January 15, 1994, review of Heart Earth, p. 954; March 15, 1996, Bill Ott, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 1219; June 1, 1999, Bill Ott, review of Mountain Time, p. 1741; August, 2003, Bill Ott, review of Prairie Nocturne, p. 1925; December 15, 2005, Bill Ott, review of The Whistling Season, p. 4.

Christian Science Monitor, December 24, 1984, James Kaufmann, review of English Creek; September 16, 1993, Brad Knickerbocker, review of Heart Earth.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1993, review of Heart Earth; July 15, 2003, review of Prairie Nocturne, p. 924; March 1, 2006, review of The Whistling Season, p. 197.

Library Journal, August, 1999, Charlotte L. Glover, review of Mountain Time, p. 137; February 1, 2006, Patrick Sullivan, review of The Whistling Season, p. 70.

Los Angeles Times, August 29, 1993, Michael Dorris, review of Heart Earth.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, October 18, 1987, Winifred Evans, review of Dancing at the Rascal Fair, p. 15; May 12, 1996, Judith Freeman, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 3.

Newsday, November 11, 1984, Wendy Smith, review of English Creek.

New Yorker, January 21, 1985, review of English Creek, p. 93.

New York Times Book Review, January 7, 1979, Wright Morris, review of This House of Sky; January 11, 1981, Raymond A. Sokolov, review of Winter Brothers: A Season at the Edge of America, p. 12; October 3, 1982, Mary Lee Settle, review of The Sea Runners, p. 9; November 1, 1987, Lee K. Abbott, review of Dancing at the Rascal Fair, p. 20; September 5, 1993, Lauren Belfer, review of Heart Earth, p. 12; June 16, 1996, Timothy Foote, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 28; August 15, 1999, Bruce Barcott, review of Mountain Time, p. 27.

Publishers Weekly, September 18, 1987, Wendy Smith, "Ivan Doig"; July 5, 1993, review of Heart Earth, p. 54; March 18, 1996, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 57; June 2, 1997, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 39; June 14, 1999, review of Mountain Time, p. 48; September 1, 2003, review of Prairie Nocturne, p. 61; March 20, 2006, Rick Bass, review of The Whistling Season, p. 33.

Salt Lake Tribune, October 19, 2003, Christy Karras, interview with Ivan Doig.

San Francisco Examiner, November 4, 1990, Burr Snider, review of English Creek.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, September 30, 1993, John Marshall, review of Heart Earth.

Seattle Times, October 12, 2003, Tim McNulty, review of Prairie Nocturne, p. K12; May 26, 2006, Tim McNulty, review of The Whistling Season.

South Dakota Review, spring, 1993, Kerry David Ahearn, "Ivan Doig's Self-Narratives: The West, the Wilderness, and the Prophetic Impulse," p. 63.

Time, September 11, 1978, Frank Trippet, review of This House of Sky, p. 90; July 1, 1996, John Skow, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 63.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), August 30, 1987, review of Dancing at the Rascal Fair, p. 7; September 26, 1993, review of Heart Earth, p. 7.

USA Today, October 26, 1984, Carol Van Strum, review of English Creek, p. 3D; June 28, 2006, Bob Minzesheimer, review of The Whistling Season.

Washington Post Book World, October 18, 1987, Richard Critchfield, review of Dancing at Rascal Fair; September 30, 1990, Susan Dodd, review of Ride with Me, Mariah Montana; June 16, 1996, David Laskin, review of Bucking the Sun, p. 4.

World and I, January, 1991, Carl Bredahl, "Western Writing, Ivan Doig, and New Ground."