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James Salter

Discussion in 'Roll of Honor & Memories - All Other Conflicts' started by GRW, Jun 24, 2015.

  1. GRW

    GRW Pillboxologist WW2|ORG Editor

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    "James Salter, who has died at the age of 90, was a prize-winning author acclaimed for his sophisticated, granular prose and sobering insights in books like Light Years and A Sport and a Pastime. An inveterate brooder about impermanence and mortality, he was the kind of writer whose language exhilarated readers even in the most distressing narratives.



    Born in Manhattan, Salter didn't enjoy great commercial success but was highly admired by critics and such peers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Ford and the late Peter Matthiessen, his friend and long-time neighbour on Long Island. He won the PEN/Faulkner prize for the 1988 collection Dusk and Other Stories and received two lifetime achievement honours for short story writing, the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud prize.
    Salter worked slowly, publishing only six novels and two story collections, along with his memoir and writings about food and travel. Few authors compare to him in economy and style. Lahiri is among those who thought he wrote some of the most perfect sentences in the English language. "Reading Salter taught me to boil down my writing to its essence," she wrote. "To insist upon the right words, and to remember that less is more. That great art can be wrought from quotidian life."
    Salter was born James Horowitz but as a writer became James Salter, a change that "started an entirely new life," he recalled in 2005. He was a US Air Force pilot, swimming pool salesman and a film-maker, his credits including the short documentary Team Team Team, the story of the US Army American football squad preparing to play against the US naval academy, and the 1969 feature film Three which featured Charlotte Rampling as the object of attention of two college friends travelling round Europe.
    The son of an estate agent who had graduated from West Point, Salter recalled in his 1997 memoir, Burning the Days, that he was an "obedient" child who was "close to my parents and in awe of my teachers." He enjoyed reading but only later became serious about it.
    Like his father, he attended West Point, and he entered the Army Air Corps. He flew more than 100 missions during the Korean War. He found his calling as a writer while in the military, reading widely and working on stories. And he found his subject – not just war, which he wrote about in his first two novels, but the whole idea of transience, of bonds formed and then severed."
    http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/james-salter-writer-whose-cult-following-admired-his-linguistically-exquisite-explorations-of-transience-love-and-war-10343403.html
     

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