Thomas
Berger, the reclusive and bitingly satirical novelist who explored the
myths of the American West in “Little Big Man” and the mores of
20th-century middle-class society in a shelf of other well-received
books, died on July 13 in Nyack, N.Y. He was 89.
His
agent, Cristina Concepcion, said she learned of his death, at Nyack
Hospital, on Monday. Mr. Berger lived in Grand View, a village in
Rockland County, N.Y., where he had remained fiercely protective of his
privacy.
Mr.
Berger fell into that category of novelists whose work is admired by
critics, devoured by devoted readers and even assigned in modern
American literature classes but who owe much of their popularity to
Hollywood. “Little Big Man,” published in 1964, is widely known for
Arthur Penn’s film adaptation, released in 1970, starring Dustin Hoffman
as the protagonist, Jack Crabb.
The
novel, told in Crabb’s voice at the age of 111, recounts his life on
the Great Plains as an adopted Cheyenne and makes the claim that he was
the only white survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But Mr.
Berger’s body of work was far broader than that, and it earned him a
reputation as an American original, if an underrecognized one. The
author and scholar Thomas R. Edwards, writing in The New York Times Book
Review in 1980, called him “one of our most intelligent, witty and
independent-minded writers.” “Our failure to read and discuss him,” Mr.
Edwards added, “is a national disgrace.”
To
many critics, “Little Big Man” was Mr. Berger’s best novel and a worthy
addition to the American canon. (The Dial Press plans a
50th-anniversary trade paperback edition this year.) “Few creative works
of post-Civil War America have had as much fiber and blood of the
national experience in them,” the historian and novelist Frederick
Turner wrote in The Nation in 1977.
Brooks
Landon, Mr. Berger’s biographer, placed “Little Big Man” in a tradition
of American frontier literature begun by James Fenimore Cooper. Henry
Miller heard echoes of Mark Twain in it.
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