num_pages: 142
description: James Salter writes novels and short stories with the lyrical precision and evocative power of a poet. In fact, his first published work, while still in prep school, were poems in Poetry magazine. Despite this extraordinary early accomplishment, his writing career was not launched until he was thirty-one years old, with the publication of his first novel, The Hunters (1956), followed by another, The Arm of Flesh (1961); and not until he was forty-one did Salter produce a work of consequence, the novel A Sport and a Pastime (1967), which Reynolds Price said is "as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know."In 1984, Esquire wrote that Salter "has been more appreciated by more serious literary authors than has any other modern American writer." Indeed, the list of Salter's admirers includes Saul Bellow, James Wolcott, Mavis Gallant and Susan Sontag. Salter's short stories have been selected for the O. Henry collections of Prize Stories in 1970, 1972, 1974, and 1984, for The Best American Short Stories in 1984, and for American Short Story Masterpieces in 1987. Salter won the P.E.N./Faulkner Award in 1992, and the Modern Library added A Sport and a Pastime to its list of distinguished classics in 1995. In 2012, P.E.N./Faulkner Foundation selected him for the 25th P.E.N./Malamud Award.In this, the first book-length study of Salter, William Dowie distills the essence of Salter's literary achievement and discusses the vicissitudes of literary glory. With copious biographical material based upon personal interviews and a twelve-year correspondence, Dowie tracks Salter from his Manhattan youth and West Point days through careers as an Air Force pilot, screenwriter, and journalist, to his blossoming as a writer of novels and short stories. What emerges is a portrait of the writer as a risk taker, willing to discard whole careers in his quest for literary immortality.
language: English
title: James Salter
titlecomplete: James Salter
ratings_count: 4
publisher: Twayne Publishers