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Salter, at left, in Korea in 1952, with other members of the 335th Fighter Squadron, the inspiration for his first novel, “The Hunters.” James Low, next to him, was the model for the book’s villain.

James Salter has died. He was 90. He did everything, so no sadness. He did not like sentimentality.

Here’s a profile of Salter from The New Yorker two years ago.

Salter aspires, in his life and his work, to an absence of sentimentality, a worldliness and unflappability that he associates with the French—Gide, Genet, Céline, Colette. He admires the Japanese, and Babel and Gogol, Dinesen and Duras. Robert Ginna once said of him, citing Graham Greene, “The writer must have a tiny sliver of ice in his heart.” This perhaps accounts for his habit of taking notes on the people around him, even good friends. “It makes people nervous sometimes,” Peter Matthiessen told me. “You see him writing away under the table.”

Read his Paris Review interview.