Ivan Doig, the award-winning and beloved author of 16 books, died at his Seattle home in the early morning hours of Thursday, April 9, 2015, of multiple myeloma. During the eight years of his illness, he wrote his four final novels, including LAST BUS TO WISDOM, which was inspired by a cross-country trip he took as a boy in the summer of ’51, and was published on August 18, 2015 by Riverhead Books.

Ivan believed that ordinary people deserve to have their stories told, and he did that in fact and fiction, beginning with THIS HOUSE OF SKY, a memoir of his own upbringing in Montana; it attracted a wide readership and was a finalist for the National Book Award. He later wrote a second memoir and another book of nonfiction, but it is for his novels that he became enduringly read. The Two Medicine Country, an imagined region based upon the Montana landscape where he came of age, is the setting for the majority of his novels, including the so-called McCaskill trilogy (ENGLISH CREEK, DANCING AT THE RASCAL FAIR and RIDE WITH ME, MARIAH MONTANA) and the New York Times bestselling THE WHISTLING SEASON, which debuted a favorite character, the itinerant charmer Morrie Morgan.

Ivan’s work earned him comparisons to Wallace Stegner, from whom he inherited the informal title “dean of Western Writers.” Indeed, the Center for the American West awarded Ivan the prestigious Wallace Stegner Award in 2007, and he was the recipient of the Western Literature Association’s lifetime Distinguished Achievement award. He is the recipient of more awards from the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association than any other writer, among numerous other honors. 

Ivan is survived by his wife, Carol, his partner in crime in researching and editing his books and a longtime professor of journalism.

Books by Ivan Doig

Last Bus to Wisdom

by Ivan Doig - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Donal Cameron is being raised by his grandmother, the cook at the legendary Double W ranch in Ivan Doig’s beloved Two Medicine Country of the Montana Rockies, a landscape that gives full rein to an 11-year-old’s imagination. But when Gram has to have surgery, all she can think to do is to ship Donal off to her sister in faraway Manitowoc, Wisconsin. Aunt Kate is bossy, opinionated, argumentative and tyrannical, prompting Donal to leave. He is joined by Herman the German, and the pair have rollicking misadventures along the way.

Sweet Thunder

by Ivan Doig - Fiction, Historical Fiction

In the winter of 1920, Morrie Morgan is drawn back to Butte, Montana, from a year-long honeymoon with his bride. But the town itself, with its polyglot army of miners struggling to extricate themselves from the stranglehold of the ruthless Anaconda Copper Mining Company, seems --- like the new couple’s fast-diminishing finances --- on the verge of implosion. These twin dilemmas catapult Morrie into his new career as editorialist for the Thunder, the fledgling union newspaper that dares to play David to Anaconda’s Goliath.

The Bartender's Tale

by Ivan Doig - Fiction, Historical Fiction

Tom Harry and his son, Rusty, make an odd kind of family, with Tom’s venerable bar their true home, but they manage just fine. That is, until the summer of 1960, when Rusty turns 12. Change arrives with gale force, in the person of Proxy, a taxi dancer Tom previously knew, and her beatnik daughter, Francine. Is Francine, as Proxy claims, the unsuspected legacy of her and Tom’s past?

The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig - Fiction