Biography

June 10, 1925 · New York City, New York, USA

June 19, 2015 · Sag Harbor, Long Island, New York, USA (natural causes)

James Horowitz

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.