Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
James Salter
Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
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.
About the Author:
Jeffrey Meyers, one of twelve Americans in the Royal Society of Literature, is the author of fifty-six books on biography, art, film, 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 and an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters honoring exceptional achievement. In 2012, he gave the Seymour Lectures in Biography at the National Libraries of Australia.
Press Reviews:
"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
"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
"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
"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
See the publisher website: LSU Press
See the complete filmography of James Salter on the website: IMDB ...
> On a related topic:
Comedy Samurai (2025)
Forty Years of Blood, Guts, and Laughter
Subject: Others persons > Larry Charles
I Got Mine (2024)
Confessions of a Midlist Writer
by John Nichols
Subject: Others persons > John Nichols
Ernest Lehman (2024)
The Sweet Smell of Success
by Jon Krampner
Subject: Others persons > Ernest Lehman
Mary C. McCall Jr. (2024)
The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Most Powerful Screenwriter
by J. E. Smyth
Subject: Others persons > Mary C. McCall Jr.
Becoming the Ex-Wife (2024)
The Unconventional Life and Forgotten Writings of Ursula Parrott
Subject: Others persons > Ursula Parrott
Thunder on the Stage (2024)
The Dramatic Vision of Richard Wright
Subject: Others persons > Richard Wright
Yankee Doodle Dandy (2024)
George M. Cohan and the Broadway Stage
Subject: Others persons > George M. Cohan
God Made My Face (2024)
A Collective Portrait of James Baldwin
Dir. Hilton Als
Subject: Others persons > James Baldwin
Back
