Salter, James 1925–

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Salter, James 1925–

PERSONAL: Born June 10, 1925, in New York, NY; married Ann Altemus, June 6, 1951 (divorced 1976); married Kay Eldredge (a journalist and playwright), 1998; children: (first marriage) Allan Conard, Nina Tobe, Claude Cray, James Owen; (second marriage) Theo Shaw. Education: United States Military Academy, B.S., 1945; Georgetown University, M.A., 1950.

ADDRESSES: Home—Aspen, CO; and Bridgehampton, NY. Office—Amanda Urban, ZCM, 40 W. 57th St., New York, NY 10019. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER: Writer and screenwriter. Military service: U.S. Air Force, 1945–57; attained rank of lieutenant colonel during the Korean War, 1952.

MEMBER: American Academy of Arts and Letters.

AWARDS, HONORS: First prize, Venice Film Festival, 1962, for Team Team Team (documentary); English-Speaking Union Prize, 1988; PEN/Faulkner Award, 1989, for Dusk and Other Stories; Edith Wharton Prize, 1998; named New York State Author, 1998–2000; PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, 2006, for Last Night; PEN/West Prize; John Steinbeck Prize.

WRITINGS:

The Hunters, Harper (New York, NY), 1957, revised edition, Counterpoint (Washington, DC)/Vintage (New York, NY), 1999.

The Arm of Flesh, Harper (New York, NY), 1961, revised edition published as Cassada, Counterpoint (Washington, DC), 2001.

A Sport and a Pastime, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1967, reprinted, Modern Library (New York, NY), 1995.

Light Years, Random House (New York, NY), 1975, reprinted, Vintage (New York, NY), 1995.

Solo Faces, Little, Brown (Boston, MA), 1979, revised edition published as Solo Faces: A Novel, North Point Press (San Francisco, CA), 1988.

Dusk and Other Stories, North Point Press (San Francisco, CA), 1988.

Burning the Days: Recollection (memoir), Random House (New York, NY), 1997.

Gods of Tin: The Flying Years, Shoemaker & Hoard (Washington, D.C.), 2004.

Last Night (stories), Knopf (New York, NY), 2005.

There & Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter, Shoemaker & Hoard (Emeryville, CA), 2005.

(With Kay Eldredge) Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days, illustrations by Fabrice Moireau, Knopf (New York, NY), 2006.

Author of documentaries, including Team Team Team; author of the screenplay for Downhill Racer; author and director of Three. Contributor of essay to The Water's Edge, by Sally Gall, Chronicle Books, 1995. Contributor to literary and popular magazines.

ADAPTATIONS: The Hunters was adapted as a 1958 film starring Robert Mitchum.

SIDELIGHTS: Author and screenwriter James Salter wrote his first two novels, The Hunters and The Arm of Flesh, based on his years in the Air Force and his service as a fighter pilot. He revised both novels and they were each reprinted approximately forty years later. Times Literary Supplement contributor Mark Greif reviewed the new edition of The Hunters, which was originally published one year before Salter left the Air Force. Greif wrote: "More than four decades after its publication, this newly revised edition of James Salter's The Hunters speaks more eloquently to the universal pains of competition, longing, envy, and betrayal than it could have when the events of America's Korean War were still fresh. It is a brisk, controlled novel, written on titanic lines. As other books of its era have fallen away, this one turns out to be a classic."

After Salter left the Air Force in 1957, he made a short documentary film, Team Team Team, which won first prize at the 1962 Venice Film Festival. After that critical recognition, he wrote a number of documentaries, including a ten-part series about the circus for public television. Four of his scripts were filmed, the most successful being Downhill Racer, starring Robert Red-ford. His relationship with movies has been ambivalent, although he wrote and directed a film starring Sam Waterston and Charlotte Rampling titled Three.

Salter's second novel is set in occupied Europe during World War II. In reviewing Cassada, the newer edition of The Arm of Flesh, a Publishers Weekly contributor noted that "Salter's feeling for weather and for the dark mysteries of solitary flight are exemplary." Salter considers his first good book to be A Sport and a Pastime, a novel that has been reprinted many times. It is the story of a Yale University dropout in Paris and his love affair with an eighteen-year-old shop girl. Adam Begley wrote in the New York Times Magazine that Salter's details, "unobtrusive in themselves, conspire to create an atmosphere so real that the love affair—agonizing, inevitable—seems to break out from the comforting confines of the imaginary." Reynolds Price, a critic for the New York Times Book Review, said that, "of living novelists, none has produced a book I admire more than A Sport and a Pastime." Price added: "In its peculiar compound of lucid surface and dark interior, it's as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know."

Light Years is about a suburban New York family, "the record," wrote Begley, "of a marriage and a way of life that seems, at first blush, whole and perfect, the bright flower of a peculiar American hybrid, bohemian bourgeoisie; later, the illusion of harmony, like the marriage, decays. The things remembered in this deeply sad life are often just that—things; and so the narrative reads at times like a lush mail-order catalogue, a dazzling display of polished surfaces."

In 1977 actor Robert Redford asked Salter to write a screenplay about mountain climbing. An amateur athlete, Salter, at age fifty-two, took up the sport and climbed for several years in the United States and France, intent on knowing his subject. Redford rejected the script, but a friend, Robert Ginna, editor-in-chief at Little, Brown, asked Salter if he would rewrite the script as a novel, and Solo Faces was published. Begley wrote that the novel "is perhaps too dark, its hero too tonguetied and solitary to appeal to a popular audience. Rock climbers, however, revel in the meticulously observed depiction of their sport; admirers of exact prose are similarly impressed."

Michiko Kakutani reviewed Salter's Dusk and Other Stories in the New York Times Book Review. Kakutani wrote that "like the stories of John Cheever, James Salter's tales shine with light—morning light, summer light, the paralyzing light of noon, and the sad, dusty light of early evening." The stories, peopled by the upper middle class, are set in New York City, on Long Island, and in Europe. Kakutani called Salter's characters "somewhat passive creatures, eager for redemption but thwarted in their feeble attempts to overcome the difficulties of the past, be it divorce, alcoholism, or a failed career. The best stories in Dusk point up the author's gift for condensation. Mr. Salter can delineate a character in a line or two, giving us, in addition to his melancholy heroes, bright, hard cameos of the people they encounter." People contributor Ralph Novak called the mood "consistent, reflecting a pervasive sense of resignation and disconnection."

Playwright A.R. Gurney wrote in the New York Times Book Review that Dusk and Other Stories "is no idle title. It is a central image and an underlying concept. Dusk, of course, is that time of day when the light changes, when we suddenly see things differently, when we are made aware of the inevitable approach of chaos and dark night. Mr. Salter writes about the 'dusk' that suddenly arrives in a relationship, in a life, and—most grimly—in a culture or civilization." Gurney noted that "this is fine writing, these are first-rate stories, and James Salter is an author worth more attention than he has received so far."

Salon.com contributor Dwight Garner called Salter's memoir, Burning the Days: Recollection, "a remarkable book … a lovely and expertly crafted elegy for Paris, for youth, for flight, for food, for women, for life itself." Salter writes of his childhood, his years at West Point, his military experiences, and his friendships with men like Redford, Roman Polanski, Irwin Shaw, and John Huston. Garner commented that "it's impossible to read Burning the Days without feeling the glow of a life vigorously lived. Salter's days weren't burned while he wasn't looking. He lit them himself." Richard Bernstein, writing in the New York Times Book Review, wrote that, "on balance, it is the dazzle, the power of the lens that this underrated writer's writer applies to his uncommon journey that stays in the mind, along with the feeling that Mr. Salter deserves to be better known and more celebrated than he has been."

Samuel Hynes, also writing in the New York Times Book Review, commented that the memoir could be read for the intimate portraits Salter paints, to understand the places, particularly France, or for the descriptions of what it is like to be a pilot. Hynes then noted that "to me there is another reason for reading Salter's book: for its eloquent witness to the writer's faith in the craft he practices. Not in style, but in the power of the human imagination to recreate in language the feeling of being, with all its elations and despairs. That belief compels high standards, and Salter has always had them." Library Journal contributor Charles C. Nash noted the book's "unwavering tone of humility, candor, and authenticity." "Salter writes about tragedy and regret with irresistible eloquence," wrote a Publishers Weekly contributor.

In There & Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter, the author presents previously published and new essays. Many of the pieces focus on the author's interest in the outdoors and his experiences hiking, skiing, and climbing. Others are more reflective in nature and discuss his love of traveling in Europe and Japan, dating back to his time in the U.S. Air Force. Olga B. Wise, writing in the Library Journal, commented: "This is an engaging collection for sophisticated travel mavens." A Publishers Weekly contributor wrote that "these essays showcase Salter's writerly touch."

Salter collaborated with his wife Kay Eldredge to write Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days. Writing in Publishers Weekly, a reviewer called the book "a quirky cornucopia," that includes everything from recipes and hints on keeping house to "appreciation of friends met both in life … and through books."

Salter told CA: "The writer's life exists for only a small number. It can be glorious, especially after death. There are provincial, national and world writers—one should compete in one's class, despise riches, as Whitman says, and take off your hat to no one." He also once wrote, in Burning the Days, "It is only in books that one finds perfection, only in books that it cannot be spoiled."

In a long essay summarizing American fiction over the final twenty-five years of the twentieth century, Michael Dirda in the Washington Post Book World wrote: "Salter is the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers … [he] displays perfect control and understated grace; he can, when he wants, break your heart with a sentence." Dirda added: "Light Years, his ambitious, somewhat neglected account of a marriage winding down, may be his masterpiece."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dowie, William, James Salter, Simon & Schuster (New York, NY), 1998.

Salter, James, Burning the Days: Recollection, Random House (New York, NY), 1997.

PERIODICALS

Booklist, September 15, 1997, Bill Ott, review of Burning the Days, p. 199; December 15, 2000, James O'Laughlin, review of Cassada, p. 788.

Esquire, July, 1982, James Wolcott, reviews of A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years, p. 120.

Forbes, May 5, 1997, review of The Hunters, p. S138.

Insight on the News, June 5, 1989, Mark Bautz, review of Dusk and Other Stories, p. 63.

Kirkus Reviews, July 1, 1997, review of Burning the Days, p. 1016; November 1, 2000, review of Cassada, p. 1513.

Library Journal, January, 1988, Grove Koger, review of Dusk and Other Stories, p. 100; August, 1997, Charles C. Nash, review of Burning the Days, p. 88, and Michael Rogers, review of The Hunters, p. 142; December, 1999, Michael Rogers, review of The Hunters,p. 194; December, 2000, Edward B. St. John, review of Cassada, p. 192; November 1, 2005, Olga B. Wise, review of There & Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter, p. 104.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, August 31, 1997, review of Burning the Days, p. 2

Nation, October 6, 1997, Gerald Howard, reviews of The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime, and Burning the Days, p. 46; March 12, 2001, Eric Weinberger, "Salter's Flight Path," p. 34.

New Statesman, February 29, 1980, Nicholas Shrimpton, review of Solo Faces, p. 324.

New Statesman & Society, February 12, 1999, Stuart Burrows, reviews of Burning the Days and The Hunter, p. 58.

New York, January 25, 1988, Rhoda Koening, review of Dusk and Other Stories, p. 63.

New York Review of Books, January 15, 1998, A. Alvarez, review of Burning the Days, p. 37.

New York Times Book Review, June 29, 1980, review of Solo Faces, p. 35; September 14, 1980, review of A Sport and a Pastime,p. 43; June 2, 1985, Reynolds Price, "Famous First Words," p. 3; February 13, 1988, Michiko Kakutani, "Epiphanic Moments," p. 16; February 21, 1988, A.R. Gurney, "Those Going up and Those Going Down," p. 9, and David Rampe, "Europe's Pull on a Writer," p. 11; August 25, 1997, Richard Bernstein, "Many Rooms in the Life of a True Writer's Writer"; September 7, 1997, Samuel Hynes, "A Teller of Tales Tells His Own," p. 9; October 25, 1998, review of Burning the Days, p. 48; December 6, 1998, review of Burning the Days, p. 96; February 11, 2001, D.T. Max, "God Was Not His Co-pilot: A Rewritten Novel about Fighter Pilots in Germany in the 1950s," p. 17.

New York Times Magazine, October 28, 1990, Adam Begley, "A Few Well-Chosen Words."

Observer (London, England), November 23, 1997, review of Burning the Days, p. 16; December 6, 1998, review of Burning the Days.

People, April 18, 1988, Ralph Novak, review of Dusk and Other Stories, p. 17; October 13, 1997, Francine Prose, review of Burning the Days, p. 38.

Publishers Weekly, June 30, 1997, review of Burning the Days, p. 58; September 1, 1997, Wendy Smith, "James Salter: A Life of Dazzling Observations," p. 81; April 18, 1998, Ralph Novak, review of Dusk and Other Stories, p. 17; November 27, 2000, review of Cassada, p. 52; October 10, 2005, review of There & Then, p. 46; May 22, 2006, review of Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days, p. 39.

Spectator, January 3, 1998, reviews of Burning the Days and A Sport and a Pastime, p. 30.

Time, September 15, 1997, John Elson, review of Burning the Days, p. 110.

Times Literary Supplement, December 19, 1997, review of Burning the Days, p. 22; January 8, 1999, Mark Greif, review of The Hunters, p. 20.

Tribune Books (Chicago, IL), July 27, 1997, review of The Hunters, p. 1.

Virginia Quarterly Review, spring, 1998, review of Burning the Days, p. 55.

Washington Post Book World, June 1, 1997, Michael Dirda, "Stylists and Visionaries: Twenty-five Years of American Fiction," p. 12; September 7, 1997, review of Burning the Days, p. 3.