James Salter

Salter was born James Arnold Horowitz, the son of a moderately wealthy New Jersey real estate consultant/economist, on June 10, 1925. He attended P.S.6, the Horace Mann School, and among his classmates were Julian Beck and William F Buckley, Jr, while Jack Kerouac attended during the 1939-40 academic year.

He is alternately said to have favored Stanford University or MIT as his choice of college, but entered West Point on July 15, 1942, at the urging of his alumnus father, Col. Louis G. Horowitz, who had gone back into the Corps of Engineers in July 1941 in anticipation of the war. Like his father, Horowitz attended West Point during a world war, when class size was greatly increased and the curriculum drastically shortened (his father graduated in November 1918, after only 16 months in the academy, and with others of his Class of 1919 was called back after a month of duty to complete a post-graduate officer's course). Horowitz graduated in 1945 after just three years, ranked 49th in general merit in his class of 852. He was known among classmates as "Horrible" Horowitz.

He completed flight training during his first class year, with primary flight training at Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and advanced training at Stewart Field, New York. On a cross-country navigation flight in May 1945, his flight became scattered, and low on fuel, he mistook a railroad trestle for a runway, crashlanding his T-G-Texan training craft into a house in Great Barrington, Massachusetts. Possibly as a result, he was assigned to multi-engine training in B-25s until February 1946, and received his first unit assignment with the 6th Troop Carrier Squadron, stationed at Nielson Field, the Philippines; Naha Air Base, Okinawa, and Tachikawa Air Base, Japan. He was promoted to 1st lieutenant in January 1947.

Salter was transferred in September 1947 at Hickam AFB, Hawaii, then entered post-graduate studies at Georgetown University in August 1948, receiving his master´s degree in January 1950. He was assigned to the headquarters of the Tactical Air Command at Langley AFB, Virginia, in March, where he remained until volunteering for assignment in the Korean War. He arrived in Korea in February 1952 after transition training in the F-86 Sabre with the 75th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron at Presque Isle Air Force Base, Maine. Horowitz was assigned to the 335th Fighter-Interceptor Squadron, 4th Fighter-Interceptor Wing, a renowned MiG-hunting unit. He flew more than 100 combat missions between February 12 and August 6, 1952, and was credited with a MiG-15 victory July 4, 1952. He used his Korean experience for his first novel, The Hunters (1956), which was made into a film starring Robert Mitchum in 1958.

The movie version of The Hunters was honored with much acclaim for its powerful performances, moving plot, and realistic portrayal of the Korean War. Although an excellent adaptation for Hollywood, it was very different from the original novel, which dealt with the slow self-destruction of a 31-year-old fighter pilot, who was once thought to be a "hot shot" but who found nothing but frustration in his first combat experience while others around him achieved glory, some of it perhaps invented.

He served twelve years in the U.S. Air Force, the last six as a fighter pilot, before leaving the military to pursue a writing career, a decision he found difficult because of his passion for flying. His works based on his Air Force experiences have a fatalistic tone: his protagonists, after struggling with conflicts between their reputations and self-perceptions, are killed in the performance of duties while inept antagonists within their own ranks soldier on. Salter paints a vivid and familiar picture for any military pilot who has survived aerial combat.

Salter was subsequently stationed in Germany and France, promoted to major, assigned to lead an aerial demonstration team, and became a squadron operations officer, in line to become a squadron commander. In his off-duty time he worked on his fiction, completing a manuscript that was eventually rejected by publishers, and another that became The Hunters. Despite the responsibilities of a spouse and two small children, he abruptly left active duty with the Air Force in 1957 to pursue his writing.

His 1961 novel The Arm of Flesh drew on his experiences flying with the 36th Fighter-Day Wing at Bitburg Air Base, Germany, between 1954 and 1957. An extensively revised version of the novel was reissued in 2000 as Cassada. However, Salter himself later disdained both of his "Air Force" novels as products of youth "not meriting much attention." After several years in the Air Force Reserve, Salter severed his connection completely in 1961 by resigning his commission after his unit was called up to active duty for the Berlin Crisis. He moved back to New York with his family, which included twins born in 1962, and legally changed his name to Salter.

Salter took up film writing, first as a writer of independent documentary films, winning a prize at the Venice Film Festival in collaboration with television writer Lane Slate (Team, Team, Team). He also wrote for Hollywood, although disdainful of it. His last script, commissioned and then rejected by Robert Redford, became his novel, Solo Faces.

Widely regarded as one of the most artistic writers of modern American fiction, Salter himself is critical of his own work, having said that only his 1967 novel A Sport and a Pastime comes close to living up to his standards. Set in post-war France, A Sport and a Pastime is a piece of erotica involving an American student and a young French girl, told as flashbacks in the present tense by an unnamed narrator who barely knows the student and who himself yearns for the girl, and who freely admits that most of his narration is fantasy. Many characters in Salter's short stories and novels reflect his passion for European culture and, in particular, France, which he describes as a "secular holy land."

Salter's prose shows the apparent influence of both Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller, but in interviews with his biographer, William Dowie, he states that he was most influenced by André Gide and Thomas Wolfe. His writing is often described by reviewers as "succinct" or "compressed", with short sentences and sentence fragments, and switching between 1st and 3rd persons, and in the present and past tenses. His dialogue is attributed only enough to keep clear who is speaking but otherwise allows the reader to draw inferences from tone and motivation.

His memoir Burning the Days uses this prose style to chronicle the impact his experiences at West Point, in the Air Force, and as a celebrity pseudo-expatriate in Europe had on the way he viewed his life-style changes. Although it appears to celebrate numerous episodes of adultery, Salter is in fact reflecting on what has transpired and the impressions of himself it has left, just as does his poignant reminiscence on the death of his daughter. A line from The Hunters expresses these feelings: "They knew nothing of the past and its holiness."

Salter published a collection of short stories, Dusk and Other Stories in 1988. The collection received the PEN/Faulkner Award, and one of its stories ("Twenty Minutes") became the basis for the 1996 film Boys. He was elected to The American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2000. In 2012, PEN/Faulkner Foundation selected him for the 25th PEN/Malamud Award as his works show the readers "how to work with fire, flame, the laser, all the forces of life at the service of creating sentences that spark and make stories burn".

Salter and his first wife Ann divorced during his screen-writing period, after which he lived with journalist and playwright Kay Eldredge beginning in 1976. They had a son, Theo Salter, born in 1985, and married in Paris in 1998.

Salter's writings—including correspondence, manuscripts and heavily revised typescript drafts for all of his published works including short stories and screenplays—are archived at The Harry Ransom Center in Austin, Texas.

"We are extremely pleased to be home to James Salter's archive," said Ransom Center Director Thomas F. Staley, "He is certainly one of our most important writers of the last fifty-years; a master of his craft. Salter's work will be judged by generations to come as one of the significant contributions to American letters of the last half of the century."

Heralded as a "writer's writer," Salter's exquisite, descriptive, and economical prose has been lavishly praised by a number of his peers—John Irving, Michael Ondaatje, Michael Herr, Peter Matthiessen, Susan Sontag, Richard Ford, and Brendan Gill. According to Matthiessen, "There is scarcely a writer alive who could not learn from his passion and precision of language."

Following a distinguished career in the U.S. Army Air Force, Salter debuted as a professional writer in 1956 with publication of The Hunters, a taut novel of aerial combat in Korea and a pilot's struggle against self-doubt as he endeavors to become a fighter ace. Salter drew on his own experience in perilous dogfights above the Yalu River to create one of the most compelling and realistic works ever written about flying. His gorgeous prose on flight recalls Saint-Exupéry, a writer he greatly admires.

The Air Force again provided the setting for Salter's second novel The Arm of Flesh (1961). Salter, though, did not intend, nor have any interest in, becoming a writer associated only with the military genre. With A Sport and a Pastime(1967), he stunningly disabused any notion that he was simply a military figure who'd quixotically exchanged sword for pen. The book is a masterpiece of erotic realism telling the story of young French girl and her affair with a wayward college drop-out from America. A commercial failure when it was published, A Sport and a Pastime is now widely accepted as a neglected classic. Reynolds Price has called it "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know," while John Irving pays it homage in his latest novel using a number of lengthy passages to form an unusual tribute.

Light Years, recounting the dissolution of a marriage, appeared in 1975. This was followed by Solo Faces (1979), a novel on the ardor of mountain climbing, and Dusk and Other Stories (1988), a collection of shorts that won the PEN/Faulkner award in 1989. According to Ned Rorem of the Washington Post, Salter's stories rank with the work of Flannery O'Conner, Paul Bowles, Tennessee Williams, and John Cheever. Burning the Days, Salter's highly praised memoir, was published in 1997. Writing in the Nation, Gerald Howard called it "literature-steeped lushness that evokes variously Fitzgerald, Babel, and even the ancients."

The archive acquired by the Center is comprehensive and unique, covering the full scope of SalterÕs literary career. Highlights include:

Manuscript notes and typescripts with revisions for The Hunters, The Arm of Flesh, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, Solo Faces, Dusk and Other Stories, and Burning the Days;

Extensive correspondence during the writing and publication of Light Years between Salter and his editor Joe Fox (also present are letters of interest on Light Years from Graham Greene, Saul Bellow, and Edna O'Brien among others);

Revised galley proofs for The Arm of Flesh and Solo Faces;

Salter's detailed research notes for Solo Faces;

Manuscripts and typescripts with revisions for Salter's screenplays including Downhill Racer (starring Robert Redford), The Appointment, and Three which Salter also directed;

Notebooks for Cassada, a revision of The Arm of Flesh to be published in 2000;

Correspondence spanning Salter's career including letters from Saul Bellow, Raymond Carver, Richard Ford, John Irving, William Kennedy, Peter Matthiessen, Joyce Carol Oates, George Plimpton, Reynolds Price, and Irwin Shaw among others.

The Hunters (novel, 1957; revised and reissued, 1997)

The Arm of Flesh (novel, 1961; republished as Cassada, 2000)

A Sport and a Pastime (novel, 1967)

Downhill Racer (screenplay, 1969)

The Appointment (screenplay, 1969)

Three (screenplay, 1969; also directed)

Light Years (novel, 1975)

Solo Faces (novel, 1979)

Threshold (screenplay, 1981)

Dusk and Other Stories (short stories, 1988; PEN/Faulkner Award 1989)

Still Such (poetry, 1988)

Burning the Days (memoir, 1997)

Gods of Tin (compilation memoir, 2004; selections from The Hunters, Cassada, and Burning the Days)

Last Night (short stories, 2005)

There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter (essays, 2005)

Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days (with wife Kay Eldredge, 2006)

"My Lord You" and "Palm Court" (2006)

Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps (2010)

All That Is (novel, 2013)

Collected Stories (2013)