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James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist


Tom Lamont: Author & Aviator - James Salter: Pilot, Screenwriter, Novelist by Jeffrey Meyers

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. Meyers adds up the number of pages in Burning the Days that are devoted to Phelps – thirteen – and describes Salter’s love for his friend, who died in 1989, as an ‘egregious example of undeserved admiration’. He claims that Phelps ‘brought out Salter’s worst traits’, including ‘lapses into a precious mannered style’ and a propensity to give ‘pretentious and irritating names’ to books and characters.

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