His fiction — such as Sanctuary, hailed as 1990’s best Western Novel by the Western Writers of America — often takes you back to an earlier time, when men rode horses, wore six-shooters, and traversed the sagebrush trails.

Gary shrugs at the description. “I write about Montana. I guess that makes me a Western writer, but I don’t know what that means. It reminds me of a reviewer writing that one of my books is an allegory. I had to look up ‘allegory’ to understand what I’d done.”

True to form, his original short story in this issue has a Western setting, but it’s actually set in the 1950s. And it’s a poignant Christmas story, not a blazing shootout in front of a corral.

“I stepped outside Montana in the books I read,” he says, explaining how he came to write this particular story. “And that led me to step outside a world with signs on saloon doors, ‘No dogs or Indians allowed.’ That’s what drove me to write ‘Henry’s Christmas,’ a Native American mother trying to shield
her son from the hatred that palled the Big Sky in the earlier years and resists closure.”

How did he come to be a writer? “I was raised in a family of storytellers,” he grins. “Stories feed stories, like the time a man shoved a pistol into Dad’s back and said, ‘I’m going to blow your guts out.’ When the assailant woke up, he was in jail. My big brother fly-fishing the Madison with a rattlesnake wrapped around his leg.

Going down a talus slope with my younger brother, hoping we would make it across before we went off the cliff at the bottom. Tough, soft, mean, glorious, bright, dim, people set like gems in a setting of sego lilies and dizzying mountains and sunsets that shade any artist’s palette. How could anyone resist writing?”

Among his more recent novels are Single Tree (1994), The Peacemaker’s Vengeance (2003), Showdown at Buffalo Jump (2003), and Outcast (2005).

His mentor was Dorothy M. Johnson (1905-1984), known for such classic Westerns as The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, A Man Called Horse, and The Hanging Tree. Many of her short stories were published in the Post back in the ’40s. Svee says, “She was a premier Montana writer, my teacher at the University of Montana School of Journalism, and a friend.”

Gary Svee serves as a fiction advisor to the Post, feeding us ideas, critiquing our selections, and helping us to keep you entertained.

Does he have more Montana stories to tell? You bet. “I’ve been mired in a screenplay,” he reports, “but short stories keep popping into my head.” We’ll share them with you from time to time.

One-on-One with the Author: Gary Svee The Saturday Evening Post

It seems appropriate: Christmas candles have been glowing here every season since 1895, when Vanderbilt first occupied Biltmore House two months before the holidays, and on Christmas Eve held a festive party with gentlemen guests dressed in white tie and tails, ladies in full-length ball gowns.

While I’d visited the estate as a teenager and again as an adult, my wife had never been. Walking toward the house, our tracks trailed behind us in the snow. In the twilight, the surrounding landscape hinted of vast forests and distant rivers — 8,000 acres in all. The estate includes River Bend Farm with an assortment of goats, chickens, and horses roaming freely in the barnyard; an award-winning winery; a deer park; a river for rafting; winding drives; and the 213-room four-star Inn on Biltmore Estate.

Holiday goodies abound at Biltmore Shops
Photo courtesy of The Biltmore Company

As a young man of 25, Vanderbilt chose this locale in the Blue Ridge Mountains in Asheville, North Carolina, following a visit with his mother. His original purchase was 125,000 acres, a parcel three times the size of the District of Columbia. The mansion took him some six years to build.

At the entrance to the property lies a Tudor village, built to house the workers who constructed Biltmore House. Today Biltmore Village is a trendy district offering chic boutiques, sidewalk cafes, and antique shops. The house itself opened to the public for the first time in 1930. Today, 1,800 employees attend to the estate’s upkeep. As we strolled toward the house, I took in its magnificent stone architecture, a French Renaissance chateau design by Richard Morris Hunt. Topped with hunched gargoyles and a steeply pitched roof, it looks as impressive now as it did in movies such as The Swan with Grace Kelly and Being There with Peter Sellers. Biltmore House has six levels: four floors plus a basement and sub-basement. The Banquet Hall rises 70 feet high.

The mammoth entrance is manned by ticket takers, for today Biltmore House is a commercial enterprise that welcomes more than 1 million visitors a year. Docents hand out earphones for an audio tour hosted by Bill Cecil, Vanderbilt’s great-grandson. The family still owns the property, with Cecil serving as president and CEO.
Just off of the Entrance Hall, the tour begins in the Winter Garden Room, a glass-ceiling solarium that, tonight, is festooned with lights. Ballroom dancers in period costumes twirl around the circular room, a festive touch for the season. Making our way to the vast Banquet Hall, we encountered the pièce de résistance, a 35-foot Christmas tree that lords over the room, pointing toward the seven-story-tall ceiling, next to the twin chandeliers and a magnificent pipe organ that is playing carols. Each November, two big Clydesdale horses pull an enormous Fraser fir to the house, taking it into the Entrance Hall and around the Winter Garden, past carved friezes of Greeks on horseback, before squeezing into the portal to the Banquet Hall. The massive stone pillars here bear the scrapings of branches being pulled through year after year.

From here we explore a Tapestry Room and book-lined Library, decorated with treasures from around the world, including Napoleon’s personal chess set, just in front of the giant stone fireplace. More than 10,000 volumes in eight languages attest to a contemporary newspaper’s claim that Vanderbilt was “the best read man in the country.”

The grounds of Biltmore House were the last grand project of famed landscaper Frederick Law Olmsted. Formal gardens cover more than 75 acres in all.
Photo courtesy of The Biltmore Company

Upstairs visitors will find 33 bedrooms, sitting rooms, and guest quarters, as well as four never-before-seen rooms to explore. In a newly opened Louis XV Suite, we found a feather tree with tabletop trees in crystal and gold and heavy garlands surrounded the fireplaces.
Floral display manager Cathy Barnhardt and her staff work all year planning the holiday event. Every room is decorated as if awaiting holiday guests. Outside, to the left of the House, there are several gardens and a Conservatory.
Later we enjoyed a Christmas dinner at the Stable Café, one of five restaurants and grills on the property. As the name suggests, this one occupies the old stable building. Its surroundings have been transformed into a shopping experience offering an array of small stores.

The Carriage House Shop features teapots and lamps and jewelry and Biltmore-brand salad dressings — not to mention wines bottled on the estate.

A confectionery shop offers mountain taffy, French chews, white chocolate champagne balls, and milk chocolate cherry cordials.

I lingered in the tiny Toymaker’s Shop, a cornucopia of teddy bears, rocking horses, and monkeys on a swing. In addition to the stuffed animals, storybooks, and iron blacksmith’s puzzles, there were turn-of-the-century Biltmore dolls, eye-dazzling kaleidoscopes, and hand-carved spinning tops.

There’s even a shop called A Christmas Past that sells holiday decorations: Father Christmases, Nativities, angels, and toy soldiers. Poinsettias, wreaths, and fat snowmen surround the room, imbuing it with a genuine sense of holiday cheer.

Even in winter, strolls on the vast estate are popular.
Photo courtesy of The Biltmore Company

As we took the shuttle back to the parking area, driving the winding roads through the snow-covered night toward the stone archway that marks the entrance (and exit) to the Biltmore Estate, I couldn’t help thinking about the live reading we’d heard on the third floor earlier that evening, the story of “The Little Match Girl.” Her tiny flames were nothing compared to the candles flickering throughout the mighty mansion; her poverty a contrast to the lavish lifestyle on display. But the last line of the story came to mind: “No one imagined what beautiful things she had seen, and how happily she had gone … into the bright New Year.”

We enjoyed our visit and saw many beautiful things. A visit to Biltmore House during the Christmas season is a journey into the extravagant past, a time when moneyed families led a palatial existence. And today you can share that grandeur. At least for one candlelit, snowy night.

Christmas at Biltmore House The Saturday Evening Post

Bradbury is a wizard with words. Dandelion Wine was a magical evocation of childhood. Something Wicked This Way Comes offered chills that outdid the Brothers Grimm. The Martian Chronicles took us to other worlds of imagination. The Illustrated Man was a paean to storytelling. Fahrenheit 451 was a love affair with books.

“Back when I was 12 years old, I was madly in love with L. Frank Baum and the Oz books, along with the novels of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, and especially the Tarzan books and the John Carter, Warlord of Mars books by Edgar Rice Burroughs. I began to think about becoming a writer at that time,” recalls Bradbury. “Simultaneously, I saw Blackstone the Magician on stage and thought, ‘What a wonderful life it would be if I could grow up and become a magician.’ In many ways, that is exactly what I did.”

His first published book was a collection of short stories called Dark Carnival, which set the tone.

Bradbury collaborated with Charles Addams on the creation of that macabre family that eventually took Addams’ name. Bradbury originally called them the Elliotts. His first story about them was “Homecoming,” published in the October issue of Mademoiselle magazine in 1946, replete with Addams’ illustrations.

However, despite being a fantasy writer, his ideas are often grounded in reality. When we asked him about “Juggernaut,” the original short fiction in this issue of the Post, he had this to say:

“The story ‘Juggernaut’ came to be because I happened to grow up among several different people who had physically moved their houses from one location to another. This always fascinated me and made me want to write a story about it.

“I was especially inspired about 60 years ago, in downtown Los Angeles, when I saw a house being moved down a big hill. Someone had painted some Indian symbols on the wheels, which I found fascinating, and I knew I must write something about this.”

In addition to a wall filled with awards and accolades, even a star on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, Bradbury received, in 2007, a special citation from the Pulitzer board for his “distinguished, prolific, and deeply influential career as an unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy.”

He likes to tell the story of his childhood meeting with a carnival performer billed as Mr. Electrico, a man who changed his life by tapping him with an electrified sword, saying, “Live forever!”

“I thought that was a wonderful idea, but how did you do it?” he reflected at the time.

We know. Through his wondrous books and stories, he will live on with readers forever.

One-on-One with the Author: Ray Bradbury The Saturday Evening Post

When we decided to restore fiction to the Post, it seemed appropriate to turn to the current generation of writers, progeny of our long-ago contributors. So, we asked John Hemingway, grandson of Nobel Prize-winning author Ernest Hemingway, to write an original story for you.

Imagine our surprise when we checked our files and could find no evidence that the Post had ever published any writing by Ernest Hemingway. The magazine was a mainstay for his friend Fitzgerald, but records show that the editors rejected at least three stories submitted by young Hemingway.

That was ironic, for biographers point out that Hemingway used fiction in the The Saturday Evening Post as a model for his early writing.

© SEPS

Hemingway recalled that in 1919 he was writing “stories which I sent to The Saturday Evening Post. The Saturday Evening Post did not buy them, nor did any other magazine. … I was always known in Petoskey as Ernie Hemingway who wrote for The Saturday Evening Post, due to the courtesy of my landlady’s son, who described my occupation to the reporter for the Petoskey paper.”

Ernest Hemingway did appear on the cover of the March 12, 1966, Post, but it was merely to promote a bio of him by his friend A. E. Hotchner.

Thus, this inaugural fiction by John Hemingway is a small recompense for our historical oversight.

John’s story of “Uncle Gus” may seem familiar to those who know his family history. He says, “It is, as I’m sure you figured out, based on my great-uncle Leicester, Ernest’s younger brother. He really was a generous person, a man of character.”

When we described it as a “pseudomemoir,” he acknowledged that as a “fair description,” adding that, “Fiction is often an embellishment of life.

“When I wrote Strange Tribe, it was a memoir dealing with my grandfather. That was a difficult book. Very stressful. If you get one detail wrong, they will crucify you. Therefore, it had to be rather scholarly. I had to stick with the facts.”

Short stories are another matter. They allow you to enhance the truth. “A short story is a very difficult form of literature, so concise, so compact, a kind of a poetry,” he observes. “With a novel or a memoir, you have the ability to take a break. You can’t do that with a short story. Every word counts.”

John wrote a number of short stories as a young man. “I’ve always liked short fiction,” he says. “I think my grandfather’s short stories were among his best writing.”

Turning serious, he says, “My objective is to write at least one story in my life as good as his.”

“Uncle Gus” was a daunting story to write. “It wasn’t the easiest choice,” he says.

John lived with his great-uncle Leicester for four years as a teenager. His mother was schizophrenic. His father had married another woman. “Les tried to make me feel like a part of the family, but I knew I had a father of my own.”

Nevertheless, this big bear of a man became an important role model for young John. “I’ll always remember his sense of family; his generosity.”
The memories come swirling back as he speaks. “I think of Les as being enormous. All that compassion.”

Ernest Hemingway's younger brother, Leicester, was also a writer in his own right.Courtesy John Hemingway

But Leicester’s own life was complex. “He was an eccentric, someone who lived in the shadow of his brother. He found it a challenge to live up to the image, to the greatness of the name.”

John faced the same challenge. “There was a difficult period in my 20s. I knew I was capable of writing, but I had to find my own voice. Then, I remembered something Les said his brother had told him, ‘You know you’ve written something great when you can make a person cry.’ ”

You will find a certain sadness in “Uncle Gus,” as well as the optimism of a young boy learning about the qualities of manhood.

“These values are not old-fashioned,” says John, his thoughts drifting back to 1977 when he was a boy of 17. “In fact, they’re extremely relevant today.”

One-on-One with the Author: John Hemingway The Saturday Evening Post