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Thomas Berger

 
 
Columbia Encyclopedia: Thomas Berger
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Berger, Thomas (bûr'gər) , 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).
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Works: Works by Thomas Berger
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(b. 1924)

1958Crazy in Berlin. Berger's first novel is a comic picaresque tale introducing Carlo Reinhart, an American G.I. in postwar Berlin who gradually sheds his optimism in a corrupt world of threat and betrayal. Reinhart's career would continue in Reinhart in Love (1962), Vital Parts (1970), and Reinhart's Women (1981). Born in Cincinnati, Berger graduated from the University of Cincinnati after wartime service and worked as a librarian at the Rand School of Social Science, as a staff writer for the New York Times Index, and as an associate editor of Popular Science.
1962Reinhart in Love. The second novel in the Reinhart series shows Reinhart out of the army and trying to cope with civilian life. He falls into the clutches of employer Claude Humbold, a real estate agent/con man, and into the arms of a scheming woman, whom he marries. Critics admire Berger's exuberant comic genius.
1964Little Big Man. Jack Crabb, a 111-year-old survivor of Custer's Last Stand, narrates his mock-heroic, picaresque adventures. This western pastiche explodes many of the cherished legends about the Old West and portrays several of its most famous figures. A sequel, The Return of Little Big Man, would appear in 1999.
1967Killing Time. Berger's most ambitious novel sheds his characteristic comic satire for a dark exploration of a mass murderer and the prevalence of violence in modern American life. A similar serious treatment of American life is evident in Sneaky People (1975), about a man who schemes to murder his wife.
1973Regiment of Women. Berger imagines the world controlled by women in the year 2125, in a heavy-handed satire of women's liberation pushed to extremes.
1977Who Is Teddy Villanova? The first of two parodies and send-ups of fictional genres, here, the detective novel. It would be followed by Arthur Rex (1978), Berger's version of the Arthurian legend.
1980Neighbors. Berger's novel is about Earl Keese, who lives on a dead-end street and feels he has also reached an impasse. Two new neighbors, Harry and Romana, are free spirits who destroy Earl's stasis. Critics cite the novel as a fine example of Berger's wordplay and energizing language.
1981Reinhart's Women. In the fourth of Berger's novels dealing with the unheroic Carlo Reinhart, the protagonist is now in his fifties and dealing with America in the late 1970s.
1983The Feud. Berger receives a Pulitzer Prize nomination for this black comedy of proliferating disasters that begin when a hardware store owner asks a customer to put away his unlit cigar.
1988The Houseguest. Berger's black comedy concerns the perfect visitor to a summer house who gradually becomes sinister and violent. Reviewer Paul Gray observes, "At his best, as he is here, Thomas Berger can command attention solely as a lonely, insidious voice insisting in a stage whisper, that fiction can be stranger than truth."
1990Orrie's Story. Berger's novel is a parodic version of Aeschylus's Oresteia, as a World War II war hero returns to his Midwestern hometown to find that his wife has taken a lover; the two conspire to murder him.
1994Robert Crews. Berger updates Defoe's Robinson Crusoe for the 1990s, depicting the survival experiences of a middle-class man when the plane carrying his fishing party in the wilderness goes down. It would be followed by Suspects (1996), about a homicide investigation.
1996Suspects. Berger's novel about crime and punishment includes characters taken straight out of the O. J. Simpson case. The Times Literary Supplement calls Berger "one of the 20th century's most important writers in the English-speaking world."
1999The Return of Little Big Man. In a sequel to Berger's classic revisionist western, Little Big Man (1964), the 111-year-old Jack Crabb continues his memoirs with offbeat profiles of western legends such as Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, Annie Oakley, and Buffalo Bill, and the "real story" behind the shoot-out at the O.K. Corral.

 
Quotes By: Thomas Berger
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Quotes:

"What is art but a way of seeing?"

"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."

 
 

 

Copyrights:

Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Works. The Chronology of American Literature, edited by Daniel S. Burt. Copyright © 2004 by Houghton Mifflin Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.  Read more
Quotes By. Copyright © 2008 QuotationsBook.com. All rights reserved.  Read more

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