June 10, 1925

James Salter (June 10, 1925 to June 19, 2015), was an American writer, of whom Britannica says:

'Horowitz was raised in New York City and attended Horace Mann School there. At the urging of his father, he entered the U.S. Military Academy, graduated a year early in 1945, and joined the U.S. Army Air Force as a pilot. He spent the next 12 years in the service, flying more than a hundred combat missions during the Korean War and rising to the rank of major. He resigned his commission after his first novel, The Hunters, was published in 1957 under the pseudonym James Salter; it was drawn from Horowitz’s experiences in Korea and has since been accounted among the best books about military aviation ever published. Even so, he told a Paris Review interviewer in 1993, “The time flying, that didn’t count. It’s like the famous eight or ten working in the shoe store. You deduct that from your literary career.”'
Gill in the New Yorker said of Salter's novel, Light Years, [1975] "Among contemporary novelists I can think of none who has written a novel more beautiful than Light Years."

According to Reynolds Price, "A Sport and a Pastime [1967] is as nearly perfect as any American fiction I know." The details constructing Salter's fictional French town, “This blue, indolent town," include "Its cats. Its pale sky. The empty sky of morning, drained and pure. Its deep, cloven streets. Its narrow courts, the faint, rotten odor within, orange peels lying in the corners.” 

Makes you either want to go to France, or read about it.