Close formation: my friendship with James Salter: a memoir

"The nearly forty-year friendship between the novelist James Salter and poet William Benton is itself, with the publication of this book, a singular literary event. Each of their voices is present in a revealing dailiness and in the complex intensities of their lives, loves, and work. The friendship of Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell comes to mind. Salter is the primary focus of the memoir. He is fifty-three when they meet and Benton is thirty-eight. From starkly different backgrounds, their friendship, founded in the immediacy of a chance encounter, deepens to an ongoing affection. Benton becomes the reader Salter shows his work to before it's published, along with Salter's wife Kay. The years include the glamour of Hollywood, personal tragedies, and triumphs. Their common horizon remains the page, where life occurs unrehearsed, and is, as Salter says, its final destination"-- Provided by publisher.