Donald McCaig (May 1, 1940 in Butte, Montana – November 11, 2018) was an American novelist, poet, essayist and sheepdog trainer. Early life and education 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. Career 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. Bibliography Poetry Last Poems, Grindstone City, Michigan The Alternative Press, 1978 Novels The Butte Polka, New York, NY, Rawson Wade, 1980 Nop’s Trials, New York, NY, Crown Publishers, Inc., 1984, . BOMC, Reader’s Digest Condensed Books Large Print Edition, Warner Paperback; British, French, German, Norwegian, Danish, Italian, Dutch, Finnish, Hungarian, Swedish and Japanese. Recorded Books, movie rights sold, QPB edition, Lyons and Burford, NYC, 1992, 2007. BMOC classic hardcover reissue: 1998, 2007. Nop’s Hope, New York, NY, Crown, 1994. Large Print Edition, Recorded Books, Japanese edition, QPB Lyons & Burford June 1998, 2007, . Jacob's Ladder: A Story of Virginia During the Civil War, New York, NY, W.W.Norton, 1998. Penguin QPB 1999. Recorded Books 1999 . Canaan, New York, NY, WW Norton, 2007. Recorded Books, March 2007. QPB 2008 Nonfiction Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men, New York, NY, Harper/Collins, 1991. Large Print, British, German editions. Recorded Books, Harper Perennial Paperback, QPB Lyons & Burford, June1998, .