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Ivan Doig (born on June 27, 1939) is an American novelist. He was born in White Sulphur Springs, Montana to a family of homesteaders and ranch hands. After the death of his mother Berneta, on his sixth birthday, he was raised by his father Charles "Charlie" Doig and his grandmother Elizabeth "Bessie" Ringer. After several stints on ranches, they moved to Dupuyer, Pondera County, Montana in the north to herd sheep close to the Rocky Mountain Front.

After his graduation from Valier high school, Doig attended Northwestern University, where he received a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in journalism. He later earned a Ph.D. in American history at the University of Washington, writing his dissertation about John J. McGilvra (1827-1903). He now lives with his wife Carol Doig, née Muller, a university professor of English, in Seattle, Washington.

Before Doig became a novelist, he wrote for newspapers and magazines as a free-lancer and worked for the United States Forest Service.

Much of his fiction is 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 so-called "McCaskill trilogy", covering the first centennial of Montana's statehood from 1889 to 1989. As the western landscape and people play an important role in his fiction, he has been hailed as the new dean of western literature, a worthy successor to Wallace Stegner.

This author page uses material from the Wikipedia article "Ivan Doig", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0