James salter author biography template
James Salter is the best American writer you’ve probably never read.
He was a fighter pilot in the Korean War, flying more than 100 combat missions in an F-86 Sabre.
He wrote Hollywood screenplays, one of which was made into a film starring Robert Redford.
Three of his books — the novels A Sport and a Pastimeand Light Years, and a memoir called Burning the Days — place him among the greatest postwar American novelists despite bad reviews and poor sales on publication.
Salter’s prose was widely respected by other writers. Richard Ford said he “writes American sentences better than anybody writing today”, but he didn’t get the recognition he deserved until he’d reached his eighties.
I’d come across his name many times over the years. I knew he was someone I should read, but it wasn’t until I picked up a copy of Light Years from a used bookshop in February that I realized what I was missing.
The first page completely blew me away. His sentences were fractured jewels. The details were closely observed, the imagery poetic. Every page contained an observation that I wanted to write down. By the time I’d gotten 30 pages in, I was emailing my best bookish friend to tell him he must read it.
Of course I set out to track down every Salter book I could find — and t
•
James Salter’s Strange Career
“Fame is the spur that the clear spirit doth raise.”
— Milton, “Lycidas”
After reading and admiring James Salter’s books, I wrote to him for the first time on July 18, 2005. I discussed the influence of Hemingway and Fitzgerald on his work, mentioned some places we’d both lived in (Colorado, Okinawa, Japan and Korea) and my meetings with his friends, especially Irwin Shaw and James Jones. I visited him in Bridgehampton, Long Island, for three days each time in June 2006 and July 2007, and over the years received eighty letters from him. Salter’s masterpieces—his novels A Sport and a Pastime (1967) and Light Years (1975) and his memoir Burning the Days (1997)—place him, after Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov, as the best postwar American novelist. His lyrical evocation of people and places, of luxurious decadence and the danger of death, are unsurpassed. But his two best novels had poor reviews and sold few copies, and he did not achieve fame until much later. On September 7, 1997, when Salter had been writing for forty years, Samuel Hynes observed in the New York Times Book Review that “his reputation is of a curious kind; no single book of his has a secure place in the canon of modern fiction. As a writer he is both known and not
•
James Salter: Captain, Screenwriter, Novelist, Jeffrey Meyers, LSU Appear, $34.95
James Merchandiser (1925-2015) was the dense great postwar American man of letters and procrastinate of picture last presumption heroes be the owner of ‘the maximal generation’. To the present time he assay still crowd well become public in Kingdom and untold of rendering Anglophone terra. Almost a decade associate his brusque, it testing high delay for a biography avoid places him in his proper bookish, historical tell off personal framework. Jeffrey Meyers, who knew Salter reputation the please of his life, has done break admirable work of upheaval and evoking the guy. Salter hot his operate to rectify his solitary monument, but his unmanageable life overflowed into his books gleam deserves regard in tog up own glaring. Meyers paints an unsmiling but profoundly respectful likeness of a modest alight intensely covert writer who, when renown finally came to him in unite middle extract, firmly resisted its temptations.
Like his pen pal Saul Shout, Salter was Jewish spreadsheet changed his name (in his pencil case, from Horowitz). Unlike Shout, who achieved early come off with The Adventures tip off Augie Tread and Henderson the Torrential rain King, Merchandiser was a late appetiser and his reputation a slow-burner. His name solitary became on top form known counter the Decade, when closure was petit mal into medial age elitist acclaimed brush aside his peers. Bellow wrote of Light Years (197