Author of the week: James Salter

last updated 8 January 2015

James Salter “works his sentences like a cadet polishing a belt buckle,” said Nick Paumgarten in The New Yorker. The award-winning novelist, 87, may never have topped best-seller lists in his half-century-long career, but among fellow writers his craftsmanship is legendary. Perfectionism could well be a product of his military background. After high school, Salter enrolled at West Point, eventually becoming an Air Force fighter pilot during the Korean War. Yet life as a military officer didn’t provide a particularly nurturing environment for a budding novelist. Salter wrote his first manuscript after West Point, but when he was among Air Force peers, he avoided even reading. “I didn’t want to appear bookish,” he says. “There was contempt for writers.” He hid his real surname, Horowitz, behind the Salter pen name so his colleagues wouldn’t know of his sideline.

Salter still regrets that he received a military education, said Thad Ziolkowski in Interview. “It’s unfortunate, in that West Point made me harder than I was,” he says. Yet the experience continues to provide literary inspiration. All That Is, Salter’s first novel in 34 years, concerns a naval officer who enters book publishing after fighting in Japan in World War II. Salter is also resigned to the fact that part of him will always be a cadet. West Point habits are “very difficult to get rid of,” he says. “I hate a messy room, for instance. And I like things to be in twos—I mean, where’s the other sock? I’m unwilling, in small things, to just say, ‘Oh, to hell with it!’”