Can a fighter pilot who killed a man in the Korean War become an influence on Sally Rooney? Can a member of Hunter Thompson’s “freak power” campaign be acclaimed as one of the most elegant sex writers of his century? Can a man who took up mountain climbing at 52, broke his leg skiing at 87, and died in a gym at 90 become the quintessential “writer’s writer”? James Salter could, and did.
Salter’s playmates and contemporaries in his affluent Manhattan childhood included William Buckley, Jack Kerouac and Richard Avedon, but he declined an offer of a place at Stanford University and went instead to West Point military academy in 1942. Born James Horowitz in 1925, he was too young for the Second World War but was deployed to Korea in 1952. Life on the base revolved obsessively around winning glory in combat. Salter flew more than 100 missions during the Korean War and had one kill, on US Independence Day, but never the five required to become an “ace”. In 1956, still in the Air Force, he wrote his first novel, The Hunters, about the dread competition between fighter pilots, and published it pseudonymously (“Salter” was Wilfred Owen’s middle name). “In this war”, Salter writes, the hero seeks to “attain himself, as men do who venture past all that is known”.
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