James Salter

Biographer and critic Jeffrey Meyers knew the novelist James Salter (1925–2015) during the last decade of his life, visited him twice on Long Island, and received eighty letters from him. Meyers’s knowledge of Salter’s life provides many new insights about the personal, literary, and historical background of his work. This appreciative book, the first full-length study in twenty-six years, is intended to introduce Salter to new readers and show his achievement as a writer of novels, stories, screenplays, memoirs, and travel essays.

Salter had an extraordinary range of experience as West Point graduate; fighter pilot in the Korean War; downhill skier, rock climber, and mountain climber; screenwriter and film director; connoisseur of food and wine; world traveler and sophisticated observer. In an elegant blend of literary criticism and intimate memoir, with crisp prose and an eye for telling detail, Meyers discusses Salter’s family and friends; the significance of his book and chapter titles; characters’ names and cultural allusions; literary influences, especially Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald; development of his fictional style and techniques; awareness of weather and light; supreme delineation of sexual ecstasy; recurrent themes of war and love; strange career and late recognition. A detailed chronology tracks the key dates and events in Salter’s life, and a chronological bibliography shows the development of his literary reputation.

For Meyers, Salter’s lyrical evocation of people and places, of luxurious decadence and the danger of death, are unsurpassed in contemporary literature. This book appears just before the centenary of Salter’s birth.