Donald McCaig

Who is Donald McCaig?

Donald McCaig is an American novelist, poet, essayist and sheepdog trainer. McCaig earned 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 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 Eston Cooke Award for Southern Fiction, and the W.Y. Boyd Literary Award for Excellence in Military Fiction.

His most recent work is 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 wasMr. 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.