Berger, Thomas [Louis] (1924–), Cincinnati‐born author, long resident in New York, whose works include
Crazy in Berlin (1958), the beginning of a comic saga about Carlo Reinhart, a happy GI in occupied Germany at the end of World War II, whose fantastic picaresque tale is continued in
Reinhart in Love (1962), with the anti‐hero back in his conformist Midwest home, and concluded in
Vital Parts (1970), in which Reinhart's curiously old‐fashioned style appeals to the salesman Bob Sweet, who wants to preserve him through cryonics.
Little Big Man (1964) is a fanciful parody of the Old West myth presented through the life of the ancient frontiersman Jack Crabb, kidnapped by Indians from an emigrant wagon and eventually a participant in Custer's last stand.
Killing Time (1967) presents through the tale of a mass murderer many questions about sanity and madness, crime and legality.
Regiment of Women (1973) fictively treats the dominance of women in the 22nd‐century U.S.
Sneaky People (1975) comically depicts the diverse involvements and deceptions of a Midwestern family in the 1930s.
Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977) is a parody of the detective novel;
Arthur Rex (1978) is a satiric and parodic retelling of Arthurian legendry;
Neighbors (1980) is a fantastic account of violent relations, real and imagined, between neighboring families;
Reinhart's Women (1981) deals again with his unheroic figure, now in his fifties.
The Feud (1983) is a melodramatic view of life and sudden death in middle U.S. towns of the 1930s;
Nowhere (1985), a witty spy story set in eastern Europe;
Being Invisible (1987), a humorous tale of a man with the power to become invisible.
The Houseguest (1988) is about the difficult experiences of an initially happy newly wed woman;
Changing the Past (1990), about a book editor in his fifties offered an eventually very sorry chance to alter his life entirely;
Orrie's Story (1990) replays
The Oresteia set in the U.S. after World War II; and
Meeting Evil (1992) throws a decent man and a scoundrel together on a day's crime spree and leads eventually to the paradox that innocence can consort with evil.
Robert Crews (1994) is a contemporary version of
Robinson Crusoe, in which the title character, a hopeless alcoholic and skill‐less man, achieves redemption by surviving in the north woods after his fishing companions are killed in a plane crash into a lake, Robert alone escaping from the underwater wreckage. His Friday is a woman who has been shot by her faux‐macho husband in the course of a camping trip. Friday and Robert redeem each other in the struggle to live in the wild, and come to love each other. They also find and overcome Friday's husband. The novel, in the same genre as Dickey's
Deliverance, is equally compelling.
