Berger, Thomas [key], 1924–2014, American novelist, b. Cincinnati, grad. Univ. of Cincinnati (B.A., 1948). He is known for bitterly comic novels that often deal with the chasm he perceives between the American dream and the unpleasant realities of middle-class life. 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 also made witty and satiric use of several literary genres—the Western in Little Big Man (1964, film 1970), his best known and most critically acclaimed work, and its sequel, The Return of Little Big Man (1999); the horror novel in Killing Time (1967); the detective story in Who Is Teddy Villanova? (1977); the spy tale in Nowhere (1985); and science fiction in Adventures of the Artificial Woman (2004). His other novels include Sneaky People (1975), The Feud (1983), Orrie's Story (1990), Meeting Evil (1992), Robert Crews (1994), and Best Friends (2003).
See biography by B. Landon (1989) and studies by D. W. Madden, ed. (1995) and B. Landon (2009).
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