NEW YORK (AP) – 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’s death was confirmed Friday to The Associated Press by Alfred A. Knopf spokesman Paul Bogaards. He did not immediately provide other details.
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 “A Sport and a Pastime” to the stories in the 2005 release “Last Night” to the 2013 novel “All That Is.”
Salter didn’t enjoy great commercial success but was highly admired by critics and by 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 making every word matter. Lahiri was among those who thought he wrote some of the most perfect sentences in the English language.