LITTLE BIG MAN

Author: Berger, Thomas

Brand: BANTAM DELL

Color: Brown

Edition: Anniversary

Features:

• Delta

Binding: paperback

Format: Deckle Edge

Number Of Pages: 440

Release Date: 01-10-1989

Details: Product Description
“The truth is always made up of little particulars which sound ridiculous when repeated.” So says Jack Crabb, the 111-year-old narrator of Thomas Berger’s 1964 masterpiece of American fiction, Little Big Man. Berger claimed the Western as serious literature with this savage and epic account of one man’s extraordinary double life.

After surviving the massacre of his pioneer family, ten-year-old Jack is adopted by an Indian chief who nicknames him Little Big Man. As a Cheyenne, he feasts on dog, loves four wives, and sees his people butchered by horse soldiers commanded by General George Armstrong Custer. Later, living as a white man once more, he hunts the buffalo to near-extinction, tangles with Wyatt Earp, cheats Wild Bill Hickok, and fights in the Battle of Little Bighorn alongside Custer himself—a man he’d sworn to kill. Hailed by
The Nation as “a seminal event,”
Little Big Man is a singular literary achievement that, like its hero, only gets better with age.


Praise for Little Big Man

 
“An epic such as Mark Twain might have given us.”
—Henry Miller
 
“The very best novel ever about the American West.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Spellbinding . . . [Crabb] surely must be one of the most delightfully absurd fictional fossils ever unearthed.”
—Time
 
“Superb . . . Berger’s success in capturing the points of view and emotional atmosphere of a vanished era is uncanny. His skill in characterization, his narrative power and his somewhat cynical humor are all outstanding.”
—The New York Times
Review
“An epic such as Mark Twain might have given us.”
—Henry Miller

“The very best novel ever about the American West.”
—The New York Times Book Review

“Spellbinding . . . [Crabb] surely must be one of the most delightfully absurd fictional fossils ever unearthed.”
—Time

“Superb . . . Berger’s success in capturing the points of view and emotional atmosphere of a vanished era is uncanny. His skill in characterization, his narrative power and his somewhat cynical humor are all outstanding.”
—The New York Times
About the Author
Thomas Berger, whom the
Times Literary Supplement has called “one of the century’s most important writers,” is the author of twenty-three novels.
Little Big Man has been published in more than fifty editions throughout the world.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
CHAPTER 1 A Terrible Mistake
 
I AM A WHITE MAN and never forgot it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.
 
My Pa had been a minister of the gospel in Evansville, Indiana. He didn’t have a regular church, but managed to talk some saloonkeeper into letting him use his place of a Sunday morning for services. This saloon was down by the riverfront and the kind of people would come in there was Ohio River boatmen, Hoosier fourflushers on their way to New Orleans, pickpockets, bullyboys, whores, and suchlike, my Pa’s favorite type of congregation owing to the possibilities it afforded for the improvement of a number of mean skunks.
 
The first time he come into the saloon and started to preach, that bunch was fixing to lynch him, but he climbed on top of the bar and started to yell and in a minute or two they all shut up and listened. My Pa could handle with his voice any white man that ever lived, though he was only of the middle height and skinny as a pick handle. What he’d do, you see, was to make a person feel guilty of something they never thought of. Distraction was his game. He’d stare with his blazing eyes at some big, rough devil off the boats and shout: “How long’s it been you ain’t seen your old Ma?” Like as not that fellow would scrape his feet and honk his nose in his sleeve, and when my brothers and sisters carried around cleaned-out spittoons for the collection, remember us kindly for our pains.
 
Pa split the collection with the saloonkeeper, which was part of the reason he was let to use the place. The other

EAN: 9780385298292

Package Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.3 x 1.1 inches

Languages: English