PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID LEVENSON / GETTY

James Salter died on Friday. He had just turned ninety, nine days before. “This birthday somehow came sooner than I thought it would,” he told the German magazine Stern, which referred to him in a way that most of our own obituarists have not, as a bestsellerautor. “I had expected to be in my eighties for longer. I would say that I am a jaded man beyond most expectations, but, like everyone else, I still have hope.”

He celebrated his birthday last Saturday in Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island, at the home of Maria Matthiessen, the widow of Peter Matthiessen, who died last year. (“We drank together, sometimes quite a bit,” Salter wrote, in a remembrance. “We got old.”) It was a dinner for about two dozen friends, one of whom wrote me Friday night, “He looked fit and very happy in the white linen suit he only wore on special summer nights. He was sharp as a briar and very funny with his acknowledgment of all the speeches. He was particularly animated later about a gift from someone: a 1946 edition of Melville's Billy Budd, Foretopman. He seemed hugely optimistic that night about a bit more time on earth.”

Less than a week later, he suffered a heart attack at the gym. It was over. The news, in its way unexpected, felt like one of those breath-stealing turns out of “Light Years,” his masterpiece, or “All That Is,” his final work. Both novels span decades, depicting fairly ordinary lives studded with such swipes of fate. Salter, though admired principally as a sculptor of sentences, may have been close to peerless (Alice Munro comes to mind, too) in his talent, and taste, for expressing the mercilessness of time’s passing. Friends, oysters, martinis, white linen, hope, wit, charm: he was adept both at living well and at describing good living, but perhaps doubly so at conveying the impermanence of any kind of life at all. His own had not been ordinary. He was a West Pointer, a fighter pilot, a veteran of the Korean War, a filmmaker and screenwriter, a sportsman, a swordsman, a roué abroad—a man’s man first and a writer’s writer later. Still, the work was delicate and almost Continental, more austere, perhaps, than the guy who made it, but about as coy.

He was born Horowitz and chose Salter. When I was working on a Profile of him, two years ago, he told me he’d first come up with a pseudonym to disguise his identity from his fellow Air Force pilots and officers, whom he was putting into his earliest short stories and novels.

“It was one of a long list of names I had written down,” he said. “And some of them were pretty bizarre. I thought, Don’t get carried away here, just make it something simple, so that it doesn’t draw a lot of attention to itself. And I picked it for that reason. It was an arbitrary and, I think, not tremendous choice.”

I asked him whether he considered himself a Jewish writer.

“Well, I’ve been trying not to be,” he said. “It’s been one of my ambitions not to be one. There are so many of them. And of course, the first books that I was writing had nothing to do with it. And then actually the third book had nothing to do with it.” The first two books were about the Air Force, and the third, his best-known and perhaps most bewitching work, was “A Sport and a Pastime,” about a love affair between an American expatriate and a French shop girl.

He was modest yet certain about his talents, anxious yet cool about his reputation, and somehow both demure and effusive about his influences. When I asked him where he thought his style came from, he replied, “Who knows.” And yet, he loved to talk about his favorite writers and what he had learned from them. Still, a knack is a knack. “In a way, it’s the way certain people can keep a tune and others can’t keep a tune,” he said. “Certain people can keep a word tune, so to speak, and certain people cannot. And, above all, certain people can tell a story, and other people can’t. They don’t hear that point where something else has to come. This is an ordinary talent you can hear in any barroom. You’re sitting there listening, and it’s a terrific story that you just told, or that he’s just told. And somebody else is telling one and your mind is wandering. You’re waiting to interrupt. What is that? They don’t mean not to be interesting. It’s not a gene or anything. It’s just that little thing, like keeping a tune.”

In spite of his concern, and that of his admirers, over his earlier critical and commercial neglect, he managed, in the end, to leave behind a very sturdy body of work—two possibly immortal novels (“Light Years” and “A Sport and a Pastime”), plus the best American novels about mountain climbing (“Solo Faces”) and jet-fighting (“The Hunters”), many cherished short stories, an excellent memoir (“Burning the Days”), and even a fine and idiosyncratic book (written with his wife Kay) about food (“Life Is Meals”). His last novel, “All That Is,” published just before he turned eighty-eight, was a stately and singular valediction, one that brought him, at last, the critical and commercial attention he’d long craved and deserved. He was briefly a bestsellerautor.

I first corresponded with him in 1992, after reading his essay “The Skiing Life” in Outside magazine and coming across his description of the death of my aunt Meta Burden, in an avalanche in Aspen. Over the next twenty years, there were a few calls and emails, having to do with magazine work and skiing, and then I finally read “Light Years.” In its thrall, and perhaps freshly mindful that life is short, I went to visit him at his and Kay’s home in Bridgehampton, on Easter Sunday, 2012. He dismissed my inkling that he had based Nedra, the alluring and selfish heroine of “Light Years,” on my aunt. It wasn’t until the following winter, when I spent several days interviewing him at his house in Aspen, for the Profile, that he told me who the real source of Nedra was: a woman named Barbara Rosenthal, a friend and neighbor from his time, in the early sixties, in Putnam County, New York, after he’d left the Air Force to have a go at writing fiction. “Life passes into pages if it passes into anything,” he once wrote. It has nowhere else to go. The pages, at least, will have some permanence.