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 Bergers 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. Review 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 ―NationOne of the best novels of the decade and the best novel ever about the American West ―New York Times