In the last days of the 1960s, James Salter, a pilot who had left the US Air Force to try to make it as a writer, was living in Aspen, subsisting on piecemeal writing gigs: screenplays, stories, essays, profiles. As a celebrity interviewer for People, he was humiliated by two famous men of letters, Graham Greene and Vladimir Nabokov, as he attempted to meet them. By this time, Salter had published three novels himself: two of them drew on his experiences in the military, while the other, A Sport and a Pastime, recounted an affair in provincial France. At the end of 1969, he received a letter from a stranger, Robert Phelps, a critic and editor based in New York, who called A Sport and a Pastime his favourite novel of the decade. ‘I must make you some sort of sign,’ Phelps wrote.
Read Full Article »
