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Little Big Man
Little Big Man
Nov 25, 2025 9:37 PM

Author:Thomas Berger

Little Big Man

'I am a white man and never forget it, but I was brought up by the Cheyenne Indians from the age of ten.' So starts the story of Jack Crabb, the 111-year old narrator of Thomas Berger's masterpiece of American fiction. As a "human being", as the Cheyenne called their own, he won the name Little Big Man. He dressed in skins, feasted on dog, loved four wives and saw his people butchered by the horse soldiers of General Custer, the man he had sworn to kill.

As a white man, Crabb hunted buffalo, tangled with Wyatt Earp, cheated Wild Bill Hickok and survived the Battle of Little Bighorn. Part-farcical, part-historical, the picaresque adventures of this witty, wily mythomaniac claimed the Wild West as the stuff of serious literature.

Reviews

A seminal event in the most significant cultural and literary trend of the 1960s... Few creative works of post-Civil War America have had as much of the fibre and blood of national experience in them

—— Nation

One of the best novels of the decade and the best novel ever about the American West

—— New York Times

Haunting

—— Sunday Telegraph

David Malouf, a spare and delicate writer, presents here the first-person story of the Roman poet Ovid's exile in the distant, frosty wastes...hypnotic in its gripping accumulation of detail, its gradual unwrapping of human reality amid what at first seems a barbarian and unknowable environment. At the centre of this meticulously well-told tale is Ovid's encounter with a wild boy, brought up among the deer in the snow

—— Sunday Times

Highly readable, sensitive and intensely moving ... a fine achievement

—— Mail and Guardian, South Africa

To speak of the novels of José Saramago is to speak of the sheer pleasure of reading

—— O Diario, Lisbon
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