James Salter, author of 'A Sport and a Pastime,' dead at 90

James Salter, the prize-winning author acclaimed for his sophisticated, granular prose and sobering insights in "Light Years," ''A Sport and a Pastime" and other fiction, has died at age 90.
Salter, who had been in good health, collapsed and died yesterday while at a gym in Sag Harbor, his wife, Kay Eldredge, told The Associated Press. The cause of his death was not immediately known.
Salter, a lifelong brooder about impermanence and mortality, was the kind of writer whose language exhilarated readers even when relating the most distressing narratives, from the erotic classic "A Sport and a Pastime" to the stories in the 2005 release "Last Night" to the 2013 novel "All That Is."

In a statement released by publisher Alfred A. Knopf, Salter's editor Robin Desser called him a "great American writer who spoke to us in a voice always pure and true."
Salter, a native of Manhattan, didn't enjoy great commercial success but was highly admired by critics and such peers as Jhumpa Lahiri, Richard Ford and the late Peter Matthiessen, his friend and longtime neighbor on Long Island.
He won the PEN/Faulkner prize for the 1988 collection "Dusk and Other Stories" and received two lifetime achievement honors for short story writing, the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud prize.

Few authors compared to Salter in economy and style. Lahiri was among those who thought he wrote some of the most perfect sentences in the English language.

"Reading Salter taught me to boil down my writing to its essence," Lahiri once wrote. "To insist upon the right words, and to remember that less is more. That great art can be wrought from quotidian life."
Salter was born James Horowitz but as a writer became James Salter, a change that "started an entirely new life," he told the AP in 2005. He was an Air Force pilot, a swimming pool salesman and a filmmaker, his credits including the short documentary "Team Team Team" and the feature film "Three," starring Sam Waterston.
The son of a real estate salesman who had graduated from West Point, Salter recalled in his 1997 memoir, "Burning the Days," that he was an "obedient" child who was "close to my parents and in awe of my teachers." He enjoyed reading but only later became serious about it.

Like his father, he attended West Point, and he entered the Army Air Corps. He flew more than 100 missions during the Korean War and resigned from the Air Force as a major in 1957.