NEW YORK — James Salter, the prize-winning author acclaimed for his sophisticated, granular prose and sobering insights in “Light Years,” “A Sport and a Pastime” and other fiction, has died at age 90.
Salter, who had been in good health, collapsed and died Friday while at a gym in Sag Harbor, his wife, Kay Eldredge, told The Associated Press. The cause of his death was not known immediately.
Salter, a lifelong brooder about impermanence and mortality, was the kind of writer whose language exhilarated readers even when relating the most distressing narratives, from the erotic classic “A Sport and a Pastime” to the stories in the 2005 release “Last Night” to the 2013 novel “All That Is.”
In a statement released by publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Salter’s editor, Robin Desser, called him a “great American writer who spoke to us in a voice always pure and true.”
Salter, a native of Manhattan, didn’t enjoy great commercial success but was highly admired by critics and such peers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Ford and the late Peter Matthiessen, his friend and longtime neighbor on Long Island. He won the PEN/Faulkner prize for the 1988 collection “Dusk and Other Stories” and received two lifetime achievement honors for short-story writing, the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud prize.
Salter was born James Horowitz but as a writer became James Salter, a change that “started an entirely new life,” he told The AP. He was an Air Force pilot, a swimming pool salesman and a filmmaker. His movie credits include the short documentary “Team Team Team” and the feature film “Three,” starring Sam Waterston.
Salter was married twice and had five children. He worked slowly, publishing only six novels and two story collections, along with his memoir and writings about food and travel. Inspiration was not the problem, but focus and energy, just making himself sit down and carry out an idea all the way through.
“Every time you start at zero,” he told The AP. “You start with a certain confidence that you have written books. But on the other hand, there’s a voice saying, ‘Yes, yes, you did it before, but now there’s this book. Let’s get back to business, you and I.’ “
