- Born
- Died
- Birth nameJames Horowitz
- Salter is considered one of the finest "writers' writers" in the U.S. in the second half of the 20th century. Born in 1925 in Passaic, NJ, Salter had his work published in _Poetry_ magazine while still in high school. His father, a former West Pointer, convinced him to attend the military institute, from which he graduated in 1945. His exploits as an Air Force fighter pilot are recounted in his memoirs, _Burning the Days_. He started writing while stationed in Honolulu, although his first novel wasn't published until 1956, just before he resigned from the Air Force. Salter has worked only intermittently on films.- IMDb Mini Biography By: Tony Adam <anthony-adam@tamu.edu>
- SpousesKay Eldredge(1998 - June 19, 2015) (his death, 1 child)Ann A. Altemus(June 6, 1951 - 1976) (divorced, 4 children)
- Salter's high school (Horace Mann) classmates included Julian Beck and Jack Kerouac.
- In the late sixties, he was hired to work on the script of "The Day Of The Dolphin" with Roman Polanski. Polanski abandoned the project in 1969, when his wife was murdered, and it was re-activated several years later by others, without Salter. A completely new script was written by Buck Henry.
- The deepest instinct is to want to do something enduring, something worthwhile, and to be engaged by that, whether one achieves it or not.
- The notion that anything can be invented wholly and that these invented things are classified as fiction and that other writing, presumably not made up, is called nonfiction strikes me as a very arbitrary separation of things. We know that most great novels and stories come from not things that are entirely invented, but from perfect knowledge and close observation. To say they are made up is an injustice in describing them. I sometimes say that I don't make anything up - obviously that's not true. But I am uninterested in writers who say that everything comes out of the imagination. I would rather be in a room with someone who is telling the story of his life, which may be exaggerated and even have lies in it, but I want to hear the true story, essentially.
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