James Salter’s editor, Robin Desser, remembered him as a ‘great American writer who spoke to us in a voice always pure and true.’ (NYT2) BRIDGEHAMPTON, N.Y. -- Sept. 12, 1999 -- WRITERS-SALTER, 09-12 -- Author James Salter at his home in August. In discussing writing, Salter says that in the richness of language, its grace, breadth, dexterity, lies its power. To speak with clarity, brevity and wit is like holding a lightning rod. We are drawn to people who know things and are able to express them clearly and to the point. (Chester Higgins Jr./New York Times Photo)Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times
James Salter, the prize-winning author acclaimed for his sophisticated, granular prose and sobering insights in Light Years, A Sport and a Pastime and other fiction, has died at age 90.
Mr. Salter, who had been in good health, collapsed and died June 19 while at a gym in Sag Harbor, N.Y., his wife, Kay Eldredge, told Associated Press. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
Mr. Salter, a lifelong brooder about impermanence and mortality, was the kind of writer whose language exhilarated readers even when relating the most distressing narratives, from the erotic classic A Sport and a Pastime to the stories in the 2005 release Last Night to the 2013 novel All That Is.
In a statement released by publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Mr. Salter's editor, Robin Desser, called him a "great American writer who spoke to us in a voice always pure and true."
Mr. Salter, a native of Manhattan, 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.
Few authors compared to Mr. Salter in economy and style. Ms. Lahiri was 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," Ms. Lahiri once wrote. "To insist upon the right words, and to remember that less is more. That great art can be wrought from quotidian life."
Mr. Salter was born James Horowitz but as a writer became James Salter, a change that "started an entirely new life," he told AP in 2005. He was an Air Force pilot, a swimming pool salesman and a filmmaker.
The son of a real estate salesman , Mr. 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 and resigned from the Air Force as a major in 1957. He found his calling as a writer while serving 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.
The year he left the military, he debuted as an author with The Hunters, a tough, straightforward novel in the Hemingway tradition. It was adapted into a 1958 film of the same name, starring Robert Mitchum.
After a second novel, The Arm of Flesh, that so dissatisfied him he rewrote it years later as Cassada, he was living in Paris, reading exalted short novels such as William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and crafting a story that would be "licentious but pure," a book "filled with images of an unchaste world more desirable than our own."
A Sport and a Pastime was a brief, poetic, almost supernaturally sexy novel about a Yale dropout and his French girlfriend. It was rejected by several publishers before George Plimpton agreed to release it, in 1967, through The Paris Review.
"There's no question it was a breakthrough," Mr. Salter told the AP. "Look, by that time I had read [Albert] Camus, I had read [André] Gide. I had read writers of greater elegance and greater intellectual sinew than you usually find in American writers."
A Sport and a Pastime, like future Salter works, demonstrated the heights and the limits of sex and love. Paradise is gained, but only for a moment or a series of moments. Relationships break up, people move on.
Mr. Salter was married twice and had five children. He worked slowly, publishing only six novels and two short-story collections, along with his memoir and writings about food and travel.
Editor's Note: The original digital version of this article incorrectly said Mr. Salter died June 19. In fact, he died June 26. This digital version has been corrected.