BY THOMAS BERGER
Adventures of the Artificial Woman
Arthur Rex
Being Invisible
Best Friends
Changing the Past
The Feud
The Houseguest
Killing Time
Little Big Man
Meeting Evil
Neighbors
Nowhere
Orrie’s Story
Regiment of Women
The Return of Little Big Man
Robert Crews
Sneaky People
Suspects
Who Is Teddy Villanova?
THE REINHART SERIES
Crazy in Berlin
Reinhart in Love
Vital Parts
Reinhart’s Women
LITTLE BIG MAN
A Dial Press Trade Paperback Book
PUBLISHING HISTORY
Delta Trade Paperback edition / October 1989
Dial Press Trade Paperback edition / July 2005
Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York
Chapter 1 and part of chapter 2 originally appeared in the March 1964 issue of Esquire magazine in slightly different form.
Copyright © 1964 by Thomas Berger
Introduction copyright © 1989 by Brooks Landon
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the Publisher, except where permitted by law. For information address Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence, New York, New York.
The Dial Press and Dial Press Trade Paperbacks are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc., and the colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
eISBN: 978-0-307-78899-3
v3.1
To Mary Redpath
CONTENTS / Little Big Man
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction by Brooks Landon
Foreword by a Man of Letters
Chapter
1 A Terrible Mistake
2 Boiled Dog
5 I Make an Enemy
4 Pronghorn Slaughter
5 My Education as a Human Being
6 A New Name
7 We Take on the Cavalry
8 Adopted Again
9 Sin
10 Through the Shutter
11 Hopeless
12 Going for Gold
13 Cheyenne Homecoming
14 We Get Jumped
15 Union Pacific
16 My Indian Wife
17 In the Valley of the Washita
18 The Big Medicine of Long Hair
19 To the Pacific and Back
20 Wild Bill Hickok
21 My Niece Amelia
22 Bunco and Buffalo
23 Amelia Makes Good
24 Caroline
25 Custer Again
26 Trailing the Hostiles
27 Greasy Grass
28 The Last Stand
29 Victory
30 The End
Editor’s Epilogue
Introduction: The Measure of Little Big Man
HAD THOMAS BERGER never written anything other than Little Big Man, he would have earned a respected place in American literary history. Just as surely as there can be no single “Great American Novel,” Little Big Man has by now been almost universally recognized as a great American novel, and while its genius was not immediately apparent to large numbers of readers or to all initial reviewers, that genius has now been recognized by some two dozen scholarly studies and uninterrupted popular sales in the more than forty years since it was first published. As L. L. Lee so accurately observed in one of the first articles to give careful consideration to Little Big Man: “This is a most American novel. Not just in its subject, its setting, its story (these are common matters), but in its thematic structures, in its dialectic: savagery and civilization, indeed, but also the virgin land and the city, nature and the machine, individualism and community, democracy and hierarchy, innocence and knowledge, all the divisive and unifying themes of the American experience, or, more precisely, of the American ‘myth.’ ” Surely Frederick Turner was correct when he concluded in a 1977 reassessment of Little Big Man for The Nation that “few creative works of post–Civil War America have had as much of the fiber and blood of the national experience in them.” It now seems safe to predict that Little Big Man the novel will match its survival skills against those of Jack Crabb, its 111-year old protagonist. And in some ways, Little Big Man must be acknowledged as Berger’s greatest novel, the one in which he took on the sweeping matter of his American literary and mythological heritage and made a lasting contribution to both.
