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Thomas Berger Profile
| Article
# : |
23399 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
Date : |
10 / 2003 |
948 Words |
| Author
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Brooks Landon is professor and chair in the English department
at the University of Iowa. In 1989 he published the first book-
length study of the novels of Thomas Berger. |
Thomas Berger's book-jacket photo has remained the same since the mid-seventies, although it has been ever more tightly cropped, revealing finally not much more than a striking shaved head, penetrating eyes, large nose, and cleft chin--easily the head of a Roman emperor or a professional wrestler. Appropriately enough, Berger's age (now seventy-nine) is almost impossible to determine from this photo, as it is from his recent novels, which unfailingly reference contemporary phenomena such as the Internet but never limit action, character, themes, or language to topical concerns.
Only the most oblique and ultimately insignificant connections can be drawn between the circumstances of Berger's life and the particulars of his fiction, even in the case of his four Reinhart books, which might seem his most autobiographically inflected. In 1987 the New York Times Book Review asked a number of authors, "Which of the characters you have created has had the greatest effect on your own life?" Berger's response was, "
"I began the writing of my first novel with the assumption that its principal character should be myself under a pseudonym, and for years ... I tried to fashion a marionette in my own image. But I got no farther than the first page until I came to understand that fiction must never be confused with that existence through which I make my daily slog--that what I required by way of a hero was almost anybody but myself." Nevertheless, a brief summary of Berger's background may be of interest, particularly since his desire for privacy has given him something of an undeserved reputation as a recluse.
Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1924 and grew up in the nearby community of Lockland, where he attended the same public school from kindergarten through high school. His father was the school's business manager. When in high school, Berger worked part-time in a branch of the Cincinnati Public Library, and he also did library work when he was in college, experience that would later help him secure his first job in New York City.
Disenchanted after a short bout with college, Berger enlisted in the Army and served from 1943 to 1946, his experiences giving him some of the background for his first novel, Crazy in Berlin. He received his bachelor's from the University of Cincinnati in 1948 and was a graduate student in English at Columbia in the school year 1950--51. There he completed course work for a master of arts, including a class with Lionel Trilling, and began a thesis on George Orwell, which he never completed. From academic graduate
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