N. A. (Noah A.) McDonald

Born in Pennsylvania in 1830, Noah A. McDonald studied at Jefferson College and Western Theological Seminary before being appointed a missionary for the Presbyterian Church in 1860. He spent years in Siam, where he worked as a missionary and gathered the observations that later shaped his writing.

McDonald is best known for Siam: Its Government, Manners, Customs, &c., a book Project Gutenberg lists under his name, and for A Missionary in Siam (1860–1870), recorded in HathiTrust. Together, these works make him a useful firsthand source for readers interested in 19th-century Siam, missionary history, and the way Americans described Southeast Asia in that period.

He died in 1897. While not a widely famous literary figure today, his books remain of interest because they preserve a personal, on-the-ground view of a place and time that many modern readers know only from later histories.