Celebrities from Janis Joplin to Marlon Brando (who wanted to make it into a film but couldn’t get backing after the disaster of Mutiny on the Bounty) raved about the book. John Cheever told Berger that on a visit to the USSR in the ‘80s he saw that “everyone at the University of Moscow was reading Little Big Man.” A piece several years later in the Times had a different tone than the paper’s original review, calling it “the very best novel ever about the American West.”

I think Larry McMurtry gets it about right in his introduction for the 50th-anniversary edition. He calls Little Big Man “an American masterpiece, up there with Hemingway and Twain.”

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Little Big Man purports to be the memoirs of a 111 year-old frontiersman, Jack Crabb, who was discovered in a nursing home by a self-proclaimed “Man of Letters,” Ralph Fielding Snell (the middle name is almost certainly a nod to the author of Tom Jones, one of the creators of the picaresque novel). Snell isn’t sure how much trust to put in Jack’s tales of his frontier adventures and notes Crabb was either “the most neglected hero in the history of this country or a liar of insane proportion.” Jack makes no apologies for the incredulity of his story: If you don’t believe him, “you can go to hell.” Snell is sure thing of one thing: Crabb was “the foulest-mouthed individual of whom I’ve ever had experience.”

Jack has been called the Zelig of the Old West, but he was much more. He was the only white survivor of Custer’s Last Stand in 1876, a witness to what came to be called the gunfight at the O.K. Corral in 1881 (according to Jack, a drunken and belligerent Doc Holliday started it all), and, finally, the murder of Sitting Bull by Indian agency police in 1890. He toured the U.S. and Europe with Buffalo Bill Cody, Sitting Bull, and their Wild West show. (The cover of The Return of Little Big Man is an actual photograph taken on the Grand Canal in Venice of Cody, Chief Bull, and an unidentified white man who Berger always insisted was Jack.)

He was a participant in many of the West’s famous events, fighting on the side of the Seventh Calvary at the Little Big Horn, and he was on a first-name basis with many Old West legends from Wild Bill Hickok to Wyatt Earp, whom he offends by belching—Earp thought Jack was mocking his name. (“When he looked at you as if you were garbage, you might not have to agree with him, but you had sufficient doubt to stay your gun hand.”) Earp “buffaloes” him, slamming the barrel of his gun across Jack’s head.

Orphaned at the age of 10, Jack was raised by the Cheyenne, but, as he tells us in his opening sentence, “I am a white man and never forgot it.” Berger researched his Plains Indians tribes assiduously, but never made the mistake of claiming to know them, judge them, or explain; he told me in an interview for American Heritage in 1999, “Indians simply never understood whites, and vice versa.”