The Gentle Giant

Gary Svee is a retired opinion page editor with the Billings Gazette. He's about six-feet-seven, and has fingers as thick as garden hoses. I marvel that he can use a keyboard. He's written several novels, most of them set in the mid-Twentieth Century, from the Great Depression into the sixties.

His favorite subjects involve the poor and downtrodden, and maybe that has to do with growing up in Columbus, Montana, with parents who struggled to stay afloat. His novels deal with subjects such as the landless Indians living on the outskirts of Montana towns, or finding work during the Great Depression, or living under the cloud of a bad reputation. Often his novels are about finding hope, or rescue, during hard times. There are powerful ethical themes running through his stories.

These are all innately literary novels, written to depict the human condition as deeply as possible. They are uniquely Montana stories, drawn from the heart and soul of the people of this state. Most of the novels were initially published in genre western fiction lines, where they don't belong, and that is why they have been overlooked all these years. But they are all much larger than routine western fiction. Two of them have won Spur Awards from Western Writers of America.

He has also written short stories, and one of them, Henry's Christmas, I regard as the finest Montana short fiction I've read. It is eternal.

He is one of Montana's top novelists.