The author who wrote a fantastical Western epic that would bring Dustin Hoffman to the big screen as a retrospective, swashbuckling fighter, died last week. Thomas Berger, who wrote Little Big Man, was 89 and lived in upstate New York. He published Little Big Man in 1964. It was turned into a film by Arthur Penn in 1970, with Dustin Hoffman as Jack Crabb, the leading man, who was adopted as a Cheyenne and became the only survivor of the Battle of Little Bighorn. Berger was considered one of America’s most reclusive, under-recognized authors.