The Cheerleader

Here is what it was like to grow up in the 1950s in the years of ponytails, pajama parties, proms, and parking, when to be popular was important and when, if you were a girl, being important meant being a cheerleader. THE CHEERLEADER is a best-selling novel about the loss of innocence, the growth of passion, and the awakening of ambition.A classic.--PUBLISHERS WEEKLYOne of the truest portraits of an American girl ever written.--DETROIT FREE PRESSIt's heartbreaking at times, hilarious at others, and she's got it all down beautifully.--PHILADELPHIA INQUIRERIf future historians and sociologists are ever impelled to find out what it was like to be a high school student in America at mid 20th century, they will need go no farther than THE CHEERLEADER for documentation and enlightenment...Utterly honest, accurate, and sympathetic.--KANSAS CITY STARA devastatingly accurate portrait of the '50s.--LIBRARY JOURNAL

Ruth Doan MacDougall was born on a chicken farm near Laconia, NH. After Dartmouth, her father, Daniel Doan, had taken up farming, the idea being that he could both raise chickens and, in a makeshift office in an extra hen house, write stories and novels. But the income wasn't enough to support a family, so eventually the Doans moved into town and 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.

Her work now includes nine novels:

The Lilting House (Bobbs-Merrill)

The Cost of Living (Putnam)

One Minus One (Putnam)

The Cheerleader (Putnam)

Wife and Mother (Putnam)

Aunt Pleasantine (Harper)

The Flowers of the Forest (Atheneum)

A Lovely Time Was Had By All (Atheneum)

Snowy, a sequel to The Cheerleader (St. Martin's)

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

On the 25th anniversary of its publication, The Cheerleader has been rereleased by Frigate Books.

Ruth's short stories have appeared in Redbook and been winners in the PEN Syndicated Fiction Project competitions. She has reviewed books for The New York Times Book Review, Newsday, The Christian Science Monitor, and many other newspapers.

Since her father's death in 1993, Ruth has assumed the authorship of his popular hiking guidebooks, 50 Hikes in the White Mountains and 50 More Hikes in New Hampshire; she has checked the trails for new editions and added prefaces, some new hikes, and new photographs. She edited Dan's Indian Stream Republic: Settling A New England Frontier, 1785-1842.

Ruth lives in New Hampshire with her husband, Donald K. MacDougall, who was a football player at Laconia High School when she was a cheerleader.