Berger, Thomas (Vol. 3) - Berger, Thomas 1924–
Berger, Thomas 1924–
Berger is an American novelist, best known for Little Big Man. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.)
Berger's books—Crazy in Berlin, Reinhart in Love, Little Big Man—are wild comedy, but they are not the facile, anything-goes surrealism of the black humorists. Neither are they satires, or polemics, or politically motivated gripes. They are funny in the way Don Quixote or Rabelais is funny—the laughter of a wise humanist, experiencing the world in all its absurdity; tolerant, pleased, saddened—and involved. The glory of Little Big Man lies in the way Berger imposes his comic view of life on a deadly accurate portrait of the Old West. I know from conversations with him that he researched the period as thoroughly as any historian, that his outlandish Cheyennes and their hilarious locutions are based on actual recorded testimony of Indian warriors. It is the truest...
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