Ruth Doan MacDougall

Ruth Doan MacDougall was born in Laconia, New Hampshire, and raised on her parents' chicken farm in neighboring Belmont. The income from the farm didn't support a family, so when Ruth was three, the Doans moved to Laconia, where her father Daniel Doan got a job at a manufacturing company. Dan gave up farming, but he continued his writing. Ruth later recalled falling asleep each evening listening to "a literary lullaby," the sound of his typewriter as he wrote at night. By the time she was six, Ruth had written her own first story and knew that she, too, was a writer. After graduating from Laconia High School, Ruth attended Bennington College from 1957 to 1959. She then transferred to Keene State College to join her husband, Don MacDougall. They graduated together in 1961. Her novel The Cheerleader, published in 1973, became a national best seller. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, optioned by Twentieth Century Fox, and adapted into an NBC-TV sitcom pilot. Seven sequels in what became "The Snowy" series took took the characters from the 1950s into the 21st century. Her many other novels include One Minus One (1971), republished in 2013 in Nancy Pearl's Book Lust Rediscoveries series. Ruth short stories have appeared in Redbook magazine and have been named winners in the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project. Her articles have been published in Publishers Weekly, the Washington Post, and New Hampshire Magazine. She has reviewed books for the New York Times Book Review, the Christian Science Monitor, Newsday, and other newspapers. After her father's death in 1993, Ruth updated his popular guidebooks, 50 Hikes in the White Mountains and 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire. She also edited his Indian Stream Republic: Settling a New England Frontier, 1785-1842.