Unlike Jack Crabb, the 121-year-old main character of Bergerʼs most famous book, Berger died at Nyack hospital on July 13 at the age of 89 in, one week before his 90th birthday.

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Berger wrote Little Big Man at the Captain John house in Palisades when he was still a struggling writer. It was not an immediate bestseller, but when director Arthur Penn made a film version in 1970 starring Dustin Hoffman, it brought renewed attention to the book.

Berger wrote more than 20 books, including the autobiographical Rinehart series, a Little Big Man sequel and The Feud, about warring families in a 1930s Midwest community. Berger served in the Army from 1943 to 1946 and used some of his experiences in Germany for his debut novel, Crazy in Berlin.

Other Berger novels made into films include Neighbors starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, and Meeting Evil featuring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.

Admirers regarded Berger as unique and under appreciated, a comic moralist attuned to the American past and present. Berger's books are often funny and accessible, immersing the reader in the permanent strangeness of his language and attitude; an attitude perhaps best encapsulated by Berger's own self- definition as a “voyeur of copulating words.”

“The only genuine problem I ever have in my work is in arriving at a style,” Berger said in a rare 1980 interview, conducted by letter with critic Richard Schickel and published in the New York Times. “Once I have it — or I should say ʻhear itʼ — the book writes itself.”

Over time he retreated from the public until, by the late 1970s, his agent and publisher didnʼt know how to reach him.

“The real truth about me is that I am monstrously lazy,” Mr. Berger told Schickel. “To walk abroad one must put on oneʼs shoes and shave.”

Berger is survived by his wife of 64 years, artist Jeanne Redpath.