James Salter - by Jeffrey Meyers (Hardcover)

About the Book

"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 friendship and knowledge of Salter's life provide many new insights about the personal, cultural, 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 to 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. Across eleven chapters, 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 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 key dates and events in Salter's life, while 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 elegant blend of biography, literary criticism, and memoir reveals why"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"The prolific novelist, short story writer, and screenwriter James Salter (né James Arnold Horowitz, 1925-2015) has his ideal biographer in Jeffrey Meyers. . . . Most important in this appreciative biography is how it guides the reader to the spare realism and inventiveness of such essential novels as The Hunters (and its film version), The Arm of Flesh (which grew out of his screenplay) and Burning the Days. Recommended."--CHOICE

"With Mr. Meyers we get the rigor of a biographer and critic along with his personal impressions of his subject, which are buttressed with extensive archival research. As with all of Mr. Meyers's work, this book is concise and acute. . . . Meyers notes how little of length has been written about Salter and that it is time for reparation, which has now started."--The New York Sun

"Passionately engaged, thoroughly well-researched, Jeffrey Meyers's perceptive study tracks the rich interaction between James Salter's life and work, the way that his extraordinary style, a way of perceiving the world, turned perishable experience into imperishable art."--Edward Hirsch, author of The Heart of American Poetry

"This is a superb evocation of Salter's singular life and brilliant work by Jeffrey Meyers, one of our greatest living biographers."--Paul Theroux, bestselling author of The Mosquito Coast

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers, one of twelve Americans in the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of fifty-five books of biography and literary criticism. His work has been translated into fourteen languages and published on six continents. He has received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation as well as an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters "to honor exceptional achievement." In 2012, he gave the Seymour Lectures in Biography at the National Libraries of Australia.