Mr. Salter’s publisher at the time, Harper, balked, complaining that the novel had “more than the normal amount of sex” and that “it would be very thin without it,” Mr. Salter recalled in an interview with The New York Times. But with the help of George Plimpton, of The Paris Review, Doubleday agreed to issue the book. The print run was small, and the publishers, Mr. Salter said, “were holding it like it was a pair of dirty socks.”

But the critics were reverential, and when the book was reissued in 1985, the novelist Reynolds Price wrote, “In its peculiar compound of lucid surface and dark interior, it’s as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know.”

“A Sport and a Pastime” had its genesis in 1961 in France, where Mr. Salter had been posted by the National Guard. There, he wrote, “ ‘I had three lives, one during the day, one at night, and the last in a drawer in my room in a small book of notes.” The notes, he said, captured things he was “unable to write or even imagine again.”

Mr. Salter recalled the experience more than 35 years later in a 1997 memoir, “Burning the Days.” “Much has faded but not the incomparable taste of France, given then so I would always remember it,” he wrote. “I know that taste, the yellow headlights flowing along the road at night, the towns by a river, the misty mornings, the thoughts of everything that happened there, the notes that confirmed it and made it imperishable.”

James Salter was born James Horowitz on June 10, 1925, in Passaic, N.J., to L. George Horowitz and the former Mildred Scheff. His father was a real estate broker and businessman. James grew up in Manhattan and attended the private Horace Mann school in the Bronx. He went to West Point at the behest of his father, a graduate, and joined the Army Air Corps (later the Air Force).

He took the pseudonym Salter — later his legal name — in publishing “The Hunters” in part to shield him from being criticized by the military as he mined it for his fiction, he told The New Yorker magazine. He also sought to conceal his Jewish heritage. “He didn’t want to be another Jewish writer from New York; there were enough of those,” as the magazine put it.

Image Mr. Salter in 2005. Credit... Ed Betz/Associated Press

Mr. Salter left the Air Force in 1957 to write, severing a connection that had been “deeper than anything I had known,” he wrote in “Burning the Days.” It was “a great voyage,” he wrote, “the voyage, probably, of my life.”