James Salter - Writing Career

Writing Career

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 final 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.