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Berger, acclaimed novelist, dies

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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, New York. He was 89.

His agent, Cristina Concepcion, said she learned of his death, at Nyack Hospital, Monday. Berger lived in Grand View, a village in Rockland County, New York, where he had remained fiercely protective of his privacy.

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 Big Horn.

But 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,” Edwards added, “is a national disgrace.”

Berger’s biographer Landon Brooks 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.

Thomas Louis Berger was born in Cincinnati on July 20, 1924. He enlisted in the Army, which put him in the Medical Corps and sent him to England and Germany as World War II raged. After the war, he enrolled at the University of Cincinnati. His wife, Jeanne Redpath Berger, a painter, is his only immediate survivor.

He was sanguine about his craft:

“Why does one write? Because it isn’t there! Unlike Everest and other celebrated eminences. Beginners sometime ask me how a novel is written, the answer to which is: Any way at all. One knows only when it is finished, and then if one is at all serious, he will never do it the same way again.”

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