Little Big Man

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.