Ruth Doan MacDougall

About the Author

Ruth Doan MacDougall was born on a chicken farm near Laconia, New Hampshire.

After Dartmouth, her father, Daniel Doan, had taken up chicken farming, the idea being that he could both raise chickens and write. As he later joked, “I even thought the plan was sound!” The income wasn’t enough to support a family, and when Ruth was three the Doans moved into town, where Dan took a job at a manufacturing company.

Although Dan gave up farming, he didn’t give up writing. Ruth remembers falling asleep each evening listening to what she later would call “a literary lullaby,” the sound of his typewriter as he wrote at night. By the time she was six, she had written her first story and knew that she too was a writer.

Ruth attended Bennington College, then transferred to Keene State College to be with her husband, Don MacDougall. After graduation, they lived in England and Boston before returning to New Hampshire, where they have lived ever since.

Ruth’s fourteen novels include:

            The Snowy Series
            The Cheerleader
            Snowy
            Henrietta Snow
            The Husband Bench, or Bev’s Book
            A  Born Maniac, or Puddles’s Progress.

The Cheerleader became a national best seller. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, optioned by Twentieth Century-Fox, and made into an NBC sitcom pilot.

Ruth’s other novels are:

The Lilting House                                           The Flowers of the Forest
The Cost of Living                                           A Lovely Time Was Had by All
One Minus One                                               A Woman Who Loved Lindbergh
Wife and Mother                                             Mutual Aid
Aunt Pleasantine

Since her father’s death in 1993, Ruth has been updating his popular hiking guidebooks, 50 Hikes in the White Mountains and 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire. She edited Dan’s Indian Stream Republic: Settling a New England Frontier, 1785–1842.

Ruth’s short stories have appeared in Redbook magazine and have been winners in the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project. She has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, The Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, and other newspapers. She is a member of the New Hampshire Magazine Council of Advisors and a recipient of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project’s Lifetime Achievement Award.