James Salter

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James Salter (2010)

James Salter , actually James Arnold Horowitz , (born June 10, 1925 in New Jersey , † June 19, 2015 in Sag Harbor , New York ) was an American writer . Salter first became an officer and was a pilot in the American Air Force. With the success of his first novel The Hunters , he retired from military service in 1957 and became a writer. In 1961 he took over his author's name as a real name. His most important works include the novels A Sport and a Pastime and Light Years . His last novel All That Is was published as a novelist in 2013 after a long break.

Life

James Salter grew up with his parents George and Mildred Horowitz, b. Scheff, in Manhattan and attended the private Horace Mann School in the Bronx. At the request of his father, who worked as a realtor and businessman, Salter studied at the Military Academy at West Point ; In 1945 he joined the Air Force and served twelve years in the Pacific, the United States, Europe and Korea - the last six years of which as a fighter pilot. Despite his family obligations as the father of two children, he retired from active military service in 1957 and followed his urge to write. The decision was difficult for him, also because he was a passionate pilot.

Salters first novel The Hunters (German: Hunter ) in 1956 based on his own experiences in more than 100 missions in the Korean War . The book was filmed in 1958 by Dick Powell under the title Kampfflieger with Robert Mitchum and Robert Wagner . The film was shown on German television under the title Kampfgeschwader Kobra . In 1961, Salter's second novel about the time was published by the Air Force, The Arm of Flesh , which was re-edited in 2000 under the title Cassada . In retrospect, Salter did not consider both early works worthy of any special attention.

After 1957, Salter was a reservist in the US Air Force. In the course of the Berlin crisis in 1961, his unit was to be ordered back into active service. Thereupon he separated from the military completely, moved back to New York with his family and took over his author's name as a real name.

In his experience in Europe lies the basis of the novel A Sport and a Pastime (German: A game and a pastime ), which was published in 1967. Because of its explicitly erotic content, the novel about the love affair between an American and a French woman in rural France was controversial at the time of its publication. He is, however, according to Salters words, the first good book he wrote, and one together later published with the eight-year Roman Lightyears (German: light-years ) to stay with those two works with which he hoped as a writer in mind.

Salter also worked as a screenwriter , for example for the 1969 sports film Schussfahrt with Robert Redford . The Venice Film Festival honored him with the first prize in 1962 for his documentary short film Team, Team, Team . Working on scripts quickly disillusioned him, he said, they deliver a lot of scripts, but only a quarter or a fifth is used.

Salter lived as a writer on Long Island , New York and in Aspen , Colorado . In 1975 the marriage with his first wife Ann divorced; She had four children: Allan (* 1955, † 1980), Nina (* 1957), Claude and James (twins, * 1962). From 1976 he lived with the journalist and playwright Kay Eldredge , with whom he has a son (Theo Salter, * 1985); the couple married in Paris in 1998. Together with his wife Kay Salter, he wrote the book Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days (published 2006) on the subject of good food .

Salter's sixth and last novel All That Is (German: Alles, Was ist ) was published in 2013, 34 years after his previous novel Solo Faces (German: In der Wand ). Like many of his earlier works, it was critically acclaimed, but not a bestseller. To the end, Salter retained the reputation of a “writer's writer”, an author for authors - valued by his colleagues, but only an insider tip for the general public. His admirers include Michael Ondaatje , Joyce Carol Oates , Susan Sontag , Julian Barnes, and Jhumpa Lahiri . Richard Ford referred to him as “the master”, and John Irving , who built a reference to A Game and a Pastime in Circus Child, judged in a review of Salter's memoir Burning the Days (1997, German: Burning days ): “Every writer [ ...] will feel small in view of Salter's great language. "

Awards

In 1989 Salter received the PEN / Faulkner Award . In 2000 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters and in 2009 to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences , and in 2010 he received the Rea Award for the Short Story . In 2013 he received the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize, endowed with US $ 150,000, in the fiction category.

The Washington Post put his works on a par with Flannery O'Connor , Paul Bowles, and Tennessee Williams .

Works

  • The Hunters (novel) 1957 - revised new edition 1997
  • The Arm of Flesh (novel) 1961 - reissued under the title Cassada 2000
  • A Sport and a Pastime (novel) 1967
    • A game and a pastime , German by Beatrice Howeg; Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 1998. ISBN 3-8270-0096-3
  • Schußfahrt (screenplay) 1969
  • The Appointment (screenplay) 1969
  • Three (screenplay) 1969
  • Light Years (novel) 1975
  • Solo Faces (novel) 1979
  • Threshold (screenplay) 1981
  • Dusk and Other Stories, 1988
    • Twilight and other stories , German by Beatrice Howeg; Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 1999. ISBN 3-8270-0097-1
    • also as: foreign coasts , same translation; Special edition, various publishers, 2003. ISBN 3-499-23424-6
  • Still Such (lyric) 1988
  • Burning the Days: Recollection (Autobiography) 1997
    • Burned Days: Memory , German by Beatrice Howeg; Berlin-Verlag, Berlin 2000. ISBN 3-8270-0099-8
  • Last Night (short stories) 2005
  • There and Then: The Travel Writing of James Salter (Essays) 2005
  • Life Is Meals: A Food Lover's Book of Days (with Kay Salter) 2006
  • Memorable Days: The Selected Letters of James Salter and Robert Phelps (Briefe) 2010
  • All That Is (novel) 2013
  • Collected Stories 2013
    • Charisma , German by Malte Friedrich, Nikolaus Hansen, Beatrice Howeg; Berlin-Verlag 2016. ISBN 978-3-8270-1327-9

Web links

Commons : James Salter  - Collection of images, videos and audio files
Wikiquote: James Salter  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Mary Norris: Holy Writ . In: The New Yorker . XCI, No. 2, February 23, 2015, ISSN  0028-792X , pp. 78-90. Retrieved February 27, 2015. “James Salter is a pen name; the writer's name is James Horowitz. "
  2. ↑ a b c d Helen T. Verongos: James Salter, a 'Writer's Writer' Short on Sales but Long on Acclaim, Dies at 90 . In: The New York Times , The New York Times Newspaper, June 19, 2015. Retrieved July 26, 2017. “James Salter was born James Horowitz on June 10, 1925, in Passaic, NJ, to L. George Horowitz and the former Mildred Scheff. " 
  3. ↑ 'A Sport and a Pastime' author James Salter dead at 90. In: seattletimes.com. June 19, 2015, accessed June 26, 2015 .
  4. ↑ a b Adam Begley: A Few Well-Chosen Words . In: The New York Times, October 28, 1990.
  5. ↑ Burkhard Scherer: Quiet days with the waitress . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of October 6, 1998.
  6. ↑ Edward Hirsch: James Salter, The Art of Fiction No. 133 . In: The Paris Review No. 127, Summer 1993. Reprinted in: Jennifer Levasseur, Kevin Rabalais (Eds.): Conversations with James Salter . University Press of Mississippi, Jackson 2015, ISBN 978-1-4968-0358-0 , no pages.
  7. ↑ Shooting in the Internet Movie Database (English). Retrieved June 26, 2015.
  8. ↑ Shot run. In: moviepilot.de. Retrieved June 20, 2015 .
  9. ↑ a b The Forgotten Hero of US Literature, Marler Zeitung , June 22, 2015.
  10. ↑ Alex Vernon: Soldiers Once And Still: Ernest Hemingway, James Salter, and Tim O'Brien . University of Iowa Press, 2004, ISBN 0-87745-886-3 . P. 132.
  11. ↑ Patrick Bahners: Seduced and Destroyed. FAZ, accessed on October 10, 2015 .
  12. ↑ Hannes Stein : We read not in a book, in a lifetime . In: Die Welt, April 9, 2013.
  13. ↑ Christiane von Korff: Admired by writers, loved by readers . In: Stern from October 8, 2013.
  14. ↑ Members: James Salter. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 24, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Salter, James
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Horowitz, James (real name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH June 10, 1925
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City , New York , United States
DATE OF DEATH 19th June 2015
Place of death Sag Harbor , New York , United States