Ivan Doig, who immortalized his Rocky Mountain roots in 16 celebrated books of both fiction and nonfiction, died on Thursday at his home in Seattle. He was 75.

The cause was multiple myeloma, said Geoff Kloske, the publisher of Riverhead Books.

Mr. Doig (pronounced DOY-guh) was a passionate writer of the purple sage, vividly breathing life into his characters (“He was lightly built, and an extraordinary amount of him was mustache”) and his upbringing (childhood was a “flame-lit and shadow-chilled time”) and poetically evoking the muscularity of his native Montana (“the climb of the continent to its divide, higher, greater, more sudden than seemed possible; like a running leap of the land”).

Reviewing his novel “The Whistling Season” in The New York Times Book Review in 2006, Sven Birkerts described Mr. Doig as “a presiding figure in the literature of the American West.”

Ivan Clark Doig was born in White Sulphur Springs, Mont., on June 27, 1939. His father, Charlie, was a ranch hand. His mother, the former Berneta Ringer, was a ranch cook. She died of asthma on Ivan’s sixth birthday.