Donald McCaig

Donald McCaig (May 1, 1940 in Butte, Montana – November 11, 2018) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and sheepdog trainer.

McCaig was born in Butte, Montana and served in the United States Marine Corps for two years.

He received a BA in philosophy from Montana State University in 1963 and subsequently completed postgraduate studies in shepherding and sheepdogs.

He had a brief but successful career on New York's Madison Avenue before moving to a sheep farm in Bath County, near Williamsville in the western mountains of Virginia with his wife, Anne.

His 1998 novel, Jacob's Ladder, and his 2008 novel, Canaan, won the Michael Shaara Award for Excellence in Civil War Fiction.

Jacob's Ladder also won the Library of Virginia Fiction Award, the John Esten Cooke Award for Southern Fiction, and the W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction.

His last work was Ruth's Journey: The Authorized Novel of Mammy from Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind, about the eponymous literary character.

His second-to-last was Mr. and Mrs. Dog: Our Travels, Trials, Adventures, and Epiphanies, which draws on twenty-five years of experience raising sheepdogs to vividly describe his—and his dogs June and Luke's—unlikely progress toward and participation in the World Sheepdog Trials in Wales.

Before that, he wrote the highly acclaimed Rhett Butler's People, a sequel to Gone with the Wind authorized by the Margaret Mitchell estate.

McCaig was also a contributor to NPR's All Things Considered.