Thomas Berger

Home > People > Literature and the Arts > American Literature: Biographies

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.

Thomas Berger , 1924–, American novelist, b. Cincinnati. He is known for bitterly comic novels that often deal with the chasm between the American dream and middle-class reality. His novelistic series Crazy in Berlin (1958), Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), and Reinhart's Women (1981) follows a picaresque, sometime title character through the vagaries of four decades of 20th-century American life. Berger has also satirized several literary genres—the Western in Little Big Man (1964), perhaps his best known work, and its sequel, The Return of Little Big Man (1999); the detective story in Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977); and the spy tale in Nowhere (1985). His other novels include The Feud (1983), Orrie's Story (1990), Meeting Evil (1992), Robert Crews (1994), Best Friends (2003), and Adventures of the Artificial Woman (2004).