Thomas Berger obit

Thomas Berger, author of Little Big Man, dies aged 89

This article is more than 9 years old

Second world war veteran wrote comic tall story of Battle of Little Big Horn that became film starring Dustin Hoffman 

He was not on the list.

Thomas Berger, the eclectic novelist who reimagined the American West in the historical yarn Little Big Man and mastered genres ranging from detective stories to domestic farce, has died at age 89.

Berger's literary agent, Cristina Concepcion, said Berger died in Nyack hospital on July 13, just days before his 90th birthday. He had been in failing health, Concepcion said.

One of the last major authors to have served in the second world war, Berger wrote more than 20 books, including the autobiographical Rinehart series, a Little Big Man sequel and The Feud, about warring families in a 1930s Midwest community. The Feud was recommended for a 1984 Pulitzer prize by the fiction jury but was overruled by the board of directors, which awarded another Depression-era novel, William Kennedy's Ironweed.

Berger's biggest mainstream success came in 1964 with Little Big Man, the wry tale of 111-year-old Jack Crabb who alleges he was abducted by Indians as a young boy and later fought with the Cherokees in the Battle of Little Big Horn. The novel was adapted into a 1970 movie of the same name starring Dustin Hoffman.

Other Berger novels made into films include Neighbours, which starred John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and Meeting Evil, featuring Samuel L Jackson and Luke Wilson.

Admirers regarded Berger as unique and underappreciated, a comic moralist attuned to the American past and present. "Berger's books are accessible and funny and immerse you in the permanent strangeness of his language and attitude, perhaps best encapsulated by Berger's own self-definition as a 'voyeur of copulating words,'" Jonathan Lethem wrote in a 2012 essay.

Berger was born in Cincinnati, the son of a public school business manager and a housewife. He was a dreamer, seeking out new worlds on the nearest bookshelf. His favourite works included the legends of King Arthur and, since he was born close enough to the 19th century to hear first-hand accounts, histories of the Battle of Little Big Horn.

"Very early in life," he once said, "I discovered that for me reality was too often either dull or obnoxious, and while I did play all the popular games that employ a ball, lower hooks into the water, and, especially fire guns, I preferred the pleasure of the imagination to those of experience, and I read incessantly."

Berger served in the army from 1943 to 1946 and used some of his experiences in Germany for his debut novel, Crazy in Berlin. He was an undergraduate at the University of Cincinnati, then a graduate student at Columbia University.

At a workshop at the New School for Social Research, Berger met such fellow students as Jack Kerouac, Mario Puzo and William Styron and a painter, Jeanne Redpath, who became his wife. He wrote short stories in his 20s but disliked the art form, believing he needed more space "to create my alternative reality".

Little Big Man was his third novel. As he told American Heritage magazine, he began the book in 1962 with "the intention of comprising in one man's personal story all the themes of the Old West that have since become legendary".

Jack Crabb was based on a fictional character, the blowhard Kit Carson in William Saroyan's play The Time of Your Life.

In more recent novels Berger satirised the frustrations of contemporary domestic life. In Best Friends he contrasted the overachieving Roy Courtright and the underachieving Sam Grandy, with Grandy's wife trapped in the middle. The Houseguest was a comic gangster story in which a thug ingratiates himself with a Long Island family, then keeps them hostage – at least they think he does. In Adventures of the Artificial Woman a technician unlucky in love constructs an ideal partner, only to have her leave him and become a movie star.

"I … have never thought of my work as being funny except incidentally," Berger once said, disputing the idea that he was a comic novelist. "I write as I do because that's the way I instinctively look at things."

Works

Novels

Crazy in Berlin (1958) Carlo Reinhart #1

Reinhart in Love (1962) Carlo Reinhart #2

Little Big Man (1964) Jack Crabb #1

Killing Time (1967)

Vital Parts (1970) Carlo Reinhart #3

Regiment of Women (1973)

Sneaky People (1975)

Who is Teddy Villanova? (1977)

Arthur Rex: A Legendary Novel (1978)

Neighbors (1980)

Reinhart's Women (1981) Carlo Reinhart #4

 

The Feud (1983)

Nowhere (1985)

Being Invisible (1987)

The Houseguest (1988)

Changing the Past (1989)

Orrie's Story (1990)

Meeting Evil (1992)

Robert Crews (1994)

Suspects (1996)

The Return of Little Big Man (1999) Jack Crabb #2

Best Friends (2003)

Adventures of the Artificial Woman (2004)

Stories

Granted Wishes: Three Stories (1984)

Previously uncollected short stories have appeared in magazines such as American Review, Gentleman's Quarterly, Saturday Evening Post, Playboy, and Harper's.

Abnormal Occurrences: Short Stories (e-book published March 2013)

Plays

Other People (1970)

Rex, Rita, and Roger (1970)

The Siamese Twins (1971)

At the Dentist's (radio play) (1981)

The Burglars (1988)