Little Big Man

Little Big Man is a novel by the American writer Thomas Berger, published in 1964 and written as a satire of the western.

The book is presented as a recorded narrative: Jack Crabb, supposedly the last living survivor of the Battle of the Little Bighorn, is interviewed by a young scholar and describes his wanderings across the nineteenth-century West. Crabb was raised by the Cheyenne after his family was killed, taken back by white relatives, and moved between the two worlds for the rest of his life, and he claims to have met Wild Bill Hickok, Wyatt Earp and Buffalo Bill along the way. Berger built the book out of first-person sources of the period, and the invented memoir imitates their voice so well that the joke is easy to miss. The comedy is broad and the history is real, and the novel uses a liar to say something accurate about how the West was written about.

It is the author's best known work and was turned into a feature film six years after it appeared.