For six decades in which he published only five novels and a collection of stories, James Salter, who has died aged 90, was a cult writer whose work generated mixed reviews and small sales. Only in the new century, following his memoir Burning the Days (1997) and his second collection of stories, Last Night (2005), did the mainstream catch up. When his sixth novel, All That Is, appeared in 2013, Salter quipped that he had signed more copies of it in an Oxford Street bookshop store than he had sold editions of all his previous books.
Salter wrote painstakingly, once calling himself a “frotteur” who liked to “rub words in his hand, to turn them around and feel them, to wonder if that’s really the best word possible”. The novelist Richard Ford, one of many fellow writers who appreciated Salter’s work long before it won general public acclaim, once declared that he “writes American sentences better than anyone”.
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