Showing results by author "Donald McCaig" in All Categories

The publication of Rhett Butler's People marks a major and historic cultural event. Through the storytelling mastery of award-winning writer Donald McCaig, the life and times of the dashing Rhett Butler unfolds. Through Rhett's eyes we meet the people who shaped his larger than life personality as it sprang from Margaret Mitchell: Langston Butler, Rhett's unyielding father; Rosemary his steadfast sister; Tunis Bonneau, Rhett's best friend and a onetime slave; Belle Watling, the woman for whom Rhett cared long before he met Scarlett O'Hara at Twelve Oaks Plantation, on the fateful eve of the Civil War.

On the Caribbean island of Saint Domingue, an island consumed by the flames of revolution, a senseless attack leaves only one survivor - an infant girl. She falls into the hands of two French émigrés, Henri and Solange Fournier, who take the beautiful child they call Ruth to the bustling American city of Savannah. What follows is the sweeping tale of Ruth's life as shaped by her strong-willed mistress and other larger-than-life personalities she encounters in the South.

With the vivid canvas of the Civil War as a backdrop, Donald McCaig conjures a passionate and richly textured story set in the heart of America's greatest and most devastating time. On Gatewood Plantation, both blacks and whites fulfill their unforgettable destinies. From the interlocked lives of masters and slaves, and a wealth of historical detail, Jacob's Ladder examines the loves, letters, and struggles of the characters, and leads to the nightmare of the lurid anguish of the battlefields.

This sequel to Donald McCaig's award-winning Civil War novel Jacob's Ladder delivers a gripping saga of Reconstruction America from Lee's 1865 surrender at Appomattox to Custer's 1876 massacre at Little Big Horn. McCaig follows the changing fortunes of a diverse ensemble of characters, including Edward, a wartime top sergeant for the 38th Regiment, US Colored Troops. Travelling west as a scout, trail cook, cattle driver, and sharpshooter, he marries a Santee Indian.

In the early 1960s Donald McCaig left his job at a hot New York advertising agency and his Greenwich Village apartment for a rustic farm in a remote county in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley. This is McCaig’s story of farming in contemporary America, a timely tribute to a dying way of life.